What Happened to My Sister

by Elizabeth Flock

  Carrie looks in wonder at her now-recovered hand, opening and closing it as though she’s just come out of a coma, then she nods up at me.

  “You need to tell me about that bruise … Well, aren’t you sweet …”

  While I am talking, Caroline takes her hand that was, until a few seconds ago, immobilized, and places it on top of mine, which is still on her knee. For a breathless moment we look down as though they are disembodied, these appendages of ours. When Cricket reaches over and puts her hand on top of ours, Carrie, eyes full of wonder, finds her words.

  “Y’all are the nicest people I ever met,” she whispers. “In my whole life.”

  Well, that just about breaks my heart.

  “Aw, honey, now you’re going to go melt my mascara right off my lashes,” I say. “It’s not hard to be nice to you—you’re such a sweetheart. Isn’t she, Cricket?”

  And then my daughter surprises me once again.

  “So what happened to your forehead?” Cricket asks her sternly.

  Carrie’s hand flutters up to cover the mark and she tells us about playing catch with a kid who lives a few doors down from them at the Loveless and how since she’s no good at baseball she got beaned and luckily it hadn’t hit her in the eye.

  “That’s what my momma said when she came rushing over,” Carrie says, “you know, when I got knocked down. She was real worried. She practically cried she was so worried about me.”

  “Of course she was,” I say.

  It does sound plausible. After all I went through with our Caroline and the Dressers, I’ve learned not to jump to conclusions too quickly.

  Eileen and Whit Dresser moved to our neighborhood from Omaha soon after Caroline was diagnosed. In fact, at first I felt bad for not having the time to go over to welcome them with cookies or a bottle of wine like you’re supposed to, but back then we could barely keep up with all the phone calls we had to return and all the other things that get brushed aside when you have a sick child in and out of the hospital. Ed and I spent our days as a tag team, spelling each other so that one of us was always with Caroline. I don’t think I even laid eyes on either Dresser for their first few months on Witherall Drive. When I wasn’t at the hospital or in a doctor’s office I was picking up the slack at home or I was hunting down second opinions, researching treatment options, washing up and returning casserole dishes, or relieving my mother, who would come over to take care of poor Cricket, whom we barely saw. The Dressers were about the furthest thing from our minds.

  Until we got a knock on the door one night from Child Protective Services. It was a Tuesday. I remember because Tuesdays happened to be the only nights Eddie had without the police beeper he’d been assigned. That particular night was a rare one that found all four of us under the same roof at the same time. Caroline was in between treatments. Eddie was upstairs reading to Cricket and I hollered up that I’d get the door. At that time it wasn’t uncommon for neighbors to stop by with food or a stuffed animal, so I didn’t think anything of it being late. We were a tight community there on Witherall Drive, a tree-lined cul-de-sac with a neatly planted island in the middle of the circle. In fall a neighborhood committee of gardeners planted mums around the edges; in May, impatiens. Thanks to an avid botanist a generation of neighbors ago, every spring dozens of bulbs shot two different varieties of yellow-headed daffodils through the thawing soil. We knew ten of the ten homeowners, nine of whom were young parents of young children who rode Big Wheels and tricycles freely in the street and ran through sprinklers in summer. The tenth home belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton, an elderly couple who had raised their three children in their powder blue vinyl-sided house and enjoyed watching ours run wild from wicker armchairs on their front porch. Most of the other homes had been updated to reflect changing and optimistically ambitious aesthetics. Front walks had pavers. Front doors had porticoes. Whitewashed brick and clapboard replaced siding. It was almost as if our houses were working in tandem with our careers to climb up the rungs of society. We had block parties twice a year, usually timed to coincide with a national holiday like the Fourth of July, where barbecues were wheeled out front and everyone pooled their food on a picnic table festively outfitted with whatever decoration befitted the occasion. Yes, the Websters were lax in taking down their Christmas lights (one year they twinkled back at me on Easter. Easter!), and yes, from time to time Jim Barnestable forgot to pick up after his dog, but on balance it was an idyllic haven in which to raise our girls. When Mr. Hamilton passed away, the grown Hamilton children returned to move their mother into a nursing home, and while it was the right thing to do—she had been showing signs of Alzheimer’s—it was heartbreaking to watch. The Dressers bought the Hamilton home at the asking price and began renovating immediately.

  Even when I saw that it was a stranger standing there at our front door on that fateful Tuesday night—even then I remember thinking perhaps they were dropping something off for one of our friends. Funny how the mind works. When you haven’t done anything wrong, when you have a wide circle of friends and family supporting you, the last thing you would ever expect is for a complete stranger to accuse you of something so abhorrent it’s almost comical. Now, of course, my suspicions are easily aroused, but back then …

  “Mrs. Edsil Ford?” the woman asked me, checking the papers she held. If she saw the humor in my husband’s name, as everyone else did, she did a great job of hiding it.

  “Yes?” I answered.

  I remember suddenly being aware of the fact that I had forgotten to put lipstick back on after dinner. A nice Southern woman is never without her lipstick.

  “I’m Marcia Clipper, C-P-S,” she said, handing me her business card.

  Being unfamiliar with the acronym, I struggled to figure out what the letters stood for and was still puzzling on it when Ed came up behind me in the doorway.

  “Can we help you?” he asked her.

  “May I come in?” she asked.

  Not waiting for an answer, she moved forward, knowing we, being polite North Carolinians, would allow her room. Looking back, I realize she was clearly so accustomed to being rebuffed that she had to make inroads before the gravity of the situation bloomed across the mind of whomever she was addressing. “Whoa there,” Eddie said. “Let’s see a badge.”

  “Here, she gave me this,” I told him, handing over the business card I had been staring at but not comprehending.

  “What’s all this about?” he asked, not even glancing at it.

  The rest of that night is a blur of tears and bewilderment and, in the end, helpless fury. Bottom line: the Dressers had seen bruises on Caroline when she went to their door selling Girl Scout cookies, which, by the way, she had begged to be allowed to do because that’s what normal kids do, she had said. Caroline had promised to come home when she felt tired. Plus, I’ll make a killing because no one’s going to turn away a Girl Scout with leukemia, she’d said. She was like that, our Caroline. Always making me smile. She got her father’s sense of humor.

  Instead of coming to us or to another of their neighbors, the Dressers called 9-1-1, and Child Protective Services rained down on us like we were running a day care in a meth lab. Even Eddie’s being on the force didn’t deter the rigorous investigation they said they were required by law to conduct. An investigation that culminated in Caroline being taken away—alone and crying—in an unmarked car to an unnamed location for questioning. To say I was apoplectic would be a massive understatement. I thought Eddie was going to have a stroke he was so mad. It was splashed across the front page of the local papers. CHAPLIN KIN INVESTIGATED FOR CHILD ABUSE. That was all anybody needed to see. Everybody was talking about it. The stares and sneers kept me from going anywhere but the hospital for a long time. Ed was put on desk duty because too many people on his beat recognized him and that put his safety at risk. Someone even threw a bottle at him, though thank God they had bad aim. His captain told him the whole thing was damaging the credibility of the force. We stopped going to
the neighborhood block parties and did our grocery shopping at night at the twenty-four-hour Kroger outside town. Our friends—our real friends—stuck by us, but many of the neighbors I’d considered friends evaporated. Which certainly made moving out a whole lot easier. In the end we were, of course, cleared of any wrongdoing, but to this day the whiff of “child abuser” trails me like cheap perfume. Memories of the turmoil it brought into our lives will remain with me for the rest of my life.

  Good Lord, the heat is oppressive today. After scrapping the grocery store, we finally pull into the driveway at home.

  “Now, girls, I’ve got to go run an errand, so I’m going to drop you off and do it now to get it over with. Y’all play upstairs and don’t make any work for Grandma, okay?”

  “Mom, we’re not babies,” Cricket says, throwing a conspiratorial look to Carrie, “we don’t play.”

  “Fine,” I say, pressing Door Unlock. “Cricket, I’ve got chips and popcorn for y’all to snack on if you’re hungry. There’s Cokes in the icebox on the door. Now y’all get that for yourselves—I don’t want you asking your grandma or she’ll want to wait on you two.”

  “Okay, okay, jeez,” Cricket says. She slides the side door open and hops out.

  I watch them bounce up the walk. And then, on her way up the porch stairs, Carrie slips her little hand into Cricket’s and my heart just about melts. I wish Eddie could see this.

  I sigh and reach around to collect the used tissues, the backpack Cricket forgot, a crumpled up Big Mac container, and the two empty Coke cans that’ve been clanking underneath the seat for days because I keep forgetting to clear out all this mess. It’s a miracle I manage to make it up the walk, through the front door, and into the kitchen without anything falling off the pyramid of trash teetering in my arms.

  And then the universe speaks.

  I’ve barely emptied everything onto the kitchen counter and said “hey” to my mother when damned if Edsil Ford isn’t rattling into the driveway. I’d recognize the sound of that old pickup truck anywhere.

  “Knock, knock!” he calls out as he lets himself in the front door. “Anybody home?”

  Mother looks at me defensively, eyes wide, mouthing “I don’t know anything about it,” but lately she’s been on a kick to get us back together, so that, coupled with her love of Nora Ephron movies, means I can’t rule out a setup. Until Cricket flies down the stairs and into her father’s arms, and then it’s all clear.

  “Daddy-O!” she says, as he swings her in a circle before putting her down and letting her out of his embrace. “Lemme go, Dad, jeez! Okay, okay, wait right here. I have something incredible to show you.”

  He laughs and watches her hurry back up the stairs, pleased too to see her so full of life for the first time in a long time.

  “Hey,” I say. I come into the front hall to prepare him, warn him, I don’t know—I guess maybe even to protect him. I feel worried about his reaction but if I’m going to be honest, part of me is also curious to see what, if any, emotion he’ll show. When he sees her. Carrie. Caroline.

  “Hey, baby.” He smiles when he sees me and I pretend to be bugged by it but secretly I’m glad he still calls me baby sometimes.

  “I take it she called you over here?” I smile and glance up the stairs at the invisible wake Cricket left behind.

  To build in a little time before he’s hit with the shock, I hustle us both out the door, explaining I need to talk to him in private. He opens the passenger door of the truck and I clamber in, smiling for a moment at the familiar smell of McDonald’s and diesel.

  “Sorry it’s so messy,” he says, brushing trash off the armrest between us, then starting the engine. “Let me get the AC going. Man, it’s hot. Speaking of which, what’s our girl all hot and bothered about? She called me yesterday and said I had to come over right away but she said it wasn’t life or death and I was pulling a double shift so—”

  “Shhh, we don’t have much time,” I say, hushing him. “Okay, first of all, Mother had a foreclosure notice tacked up to the door yesterday. That’s number one.”

  “What?” He turns in his seat to face me. “You’re kidding me.”

  “No, unfortunately, I’m not. Apparently she’s been handing all her money over to Hunter, though of course she won’t admit it. But there’s something else. I just want to prepare you. Cricket has a new friend. A little girl. We don’t know much of anything about her yet—she’s new to town, staying with her mother at the Loveless of all places.”

  “What’s that got to do with the foreclosure?” he asks. “And what’re they doing in that dump?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” I say, nodding. “They’re barely making ends meet from the sound of it, but that’s a whole other story. This girl, she looks—”

  Before I can finish, Cricket knocks on his window and points to little Carrie standing next to her in the burning sun. I hadn’t seen them come out. Ed is now plunged into the shock of recognition Cricket, Mother, and I had. He feels for the door handle and robotically opens his door without for a second taking his eyes off Carrie.

  “I tried to warn you.” I mutter the words as I hop out onto the driveway, but he doesn’t hear me and what does it matter anyway?

  “Dad, this is my friend.” Cricket gently holds Carrie by the shoulders. It’s unclear what other than monumental shock is going on in Eddie’s mind.

  “Caroline,” he whispers the name.

  “You can call me Carrie, sir,” she says, searching my face to see if Ed hearing that name would count against her, poor thing.

  I never would have predicted what comes next. Never in a million years. Edsil Ford, my stoic husband who barely showed a flicker of emotion after Caroline’s passing, drops to his knees in front of Carrie. His knees!

  “Your name is Caroline?” he asks her in an almost-whisper.

  She nods.

  Cricket comes to stand beside me, I put my arm around her, and together we watch in total amazement as her father bursts into tears. Tears!

  Carrie looks at us panicked, but before I can reassure her or explain or even just smile, Eddie pulls her into him, hugging her, still sobbing like a newborn. After a minute or so Cricket stands on her tiptoes to whisper, “Mom, do something” in my ear, breaking my reverie. I clear my throat because, well, because I want to give Eddie a chance to regain his composure on his own. He’s a proud man, Eddie. But throat clearing doesn’t get through. He’s that broken up.

  “Um, Carrie honey, I’m sorry,” I say, stepping forward to rest a hand on Eddie’s back, feeling an ache of love and sadness and grief rush in at the contact. “Mr. Ford’s just surprised at the likeness we talked about.”

  I lean down to quietly comfort Ed, who is still holding on to Carrie as if for dear life.

  “Eddie, let’s let poor Carrie here catch her breath, m’kay? Ed? Baby, I know. I know.”

  He releases Carrie and struggles to his feet.

  “Of course, of course.” He sniffs and mops his face with a red bandanna he’s pulled from his back pocket. “Sorry. Jeez.”

  “Cricket, take Carrie on inside while Dad and I catch up, will you?” I smile to let her know he’ll be okay, but will he? I don’t know.

  “Come on, Carrie,” Cricket says.

  Then I get the wish I’d thought of only a few minutes ago. This time, though, Cricket reaches for Carrie’s hand and, with Eddie and me looking on, mouths hanging open, they skitter up the walk, up the steps, and into the house. The door closes behind them. We turn to face one another and once again, this man I’m so dang confused about stuns me. Now it’s me he’s pulling into him, burying his head in my hair, his words tumbling into my ear.

  “I prayed to God for Him to give me more time with her.” He chokes back sobs. “I swore I’d keep holding myself together, be a better husband and father, if I could just have more time. You fell apart—you did, and that’s fine, Honor, you have every right. We couldn’t both crumble, and anyway I’m the man. I’m suppo
sed to be rock steady. But you want to know the truth? The truth is I’ve been holding out for a miracle. All this time, I’ve been waiting. I still pray for Him to let me see her again, just one more time. I pray so hard, baby, I pray so hard I’ve been worried I’m losing my mind.”

  I hold him, stroke his back, and whisper, “Shhh …”

  “You just don’t know,” he’s sobbing. “You just don’t know.”

  But I do know.

  Because I do the same thing.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Carrie

  Things I Now Know About Momma

  1. She had a best friend named Suzy Bridges. They got caught smoking cigarettes on school property. More than once.

  2. She wasn’t in any clubs in high school and she didn’t play sports.

  3. Momma was prom queen.

  4. Mr. White was prom king. And he had hair back then.

  5. Momma was voted Most Beautiful.

  Things I Now Know About Daddy

  1. His nickname in high school was Hef.

  2. He drove real fast but never got speeding tickets.

  3. He was captain of the football team.

  4. He was good at getting free beer.

  5. He was voted Most Likely to Be Found Dead in a Ditch.

  Cricket’s computer really does have the answer to any question you ask it. I’ve never seen a school picture of Momma—and I’m her flesh and blood!—but the computer has, and all Cricket had to do was push a few buttons to find it. Momma was about a million times prettier back then and she’s real pretty now. Her yearbook shows her smiling, her hair almost reaching her elbow, curly at the ends. She didn’t wear as much makeup as some of the other girls in her class—we could see their pictures too. The whole yearbook was there waiting for us. Momma wore a cross around her neck and a pretty pink button-down shirt that looked ironed. And from what some of the writing underneath the pictures said, she and Suzy Bridges did ever-thing together. They were inseparable, the Panther’s Paw said. It also said my daddy had to do a detention for unscrewing all the tops of the saltshakers in the school cafeteria. It said yet another detention but it didn’t say what else he got in trouble for. Oh, and it listed Mr. White as senior class president.