The Sisters

by Nancy Jensen

  “Where’s Grandpa?”

  “He’s home with Grace. They’ll come in to see you after church tomorrow.”

  Lynn wanted to ask if Grandpa would come on his own just to see her special, without Grace tagging along to hog up everybody’s laughs and proud smiles, but she couldn’t work out how to say it without making her grandmother wag her finger and tell her not to be so selfish.

  “Now,” Grandma said, “if the doctor says it’s okay for you to have it, I’ll send your grandpa out to get you some chicken from Colonel Sanders. You and your sister can eat it here on the bed, like a picnic. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  Lynn closed her eyes and swallowed hard. Her throat was dry and her nose still itched. It was hard making Grandma understand. “Where am I?”

  Grandma’s eyes and mouth opened wide. “Well, you know where you are. We’ve been here since yesterday.”

  Lynn couldn’t remember yesterday.

  “It’s the hospital, sugar.”

  “Is Bob here?” Lynn asked.

  “Bob?”

  In her head, Lynn could see Bob’s dark hair and the way he always smiled with his mouth closed, but then his picture swam away and she saw, only for a second, a bald man in black robes sitting behind a shining wooden wall that was taller than she was. Bob had another name. What was it? “Dr. Hughes,” Lynn said, suddenly remembering Bob wasn’t a real person. Her cheeks burned. Grandma would think she was stupid.

  Grandma laughed. “That’s a television hospital,” she said. “This is a real hospital. Remember how we came to see Mrs. Davis here one time?”

  She remembered Mrs. Davis—the tiny lady from church who had a bunch of violets on her hat. Mrs. Davis carried butterscotch in her purse and every Sunday she gave Lynn two pieces—one for her and one for Grace—but Grace didn’t know about that, since Lynn always ate them both. When Mrs. Davis got sick, Grandma had made Lynn and Grace come to the hospital with her. Then one Sunday, the preacher said Mrs. Davis had passed away.

  “Am I going to pass away?” Lynn asked. She knew that meant die, but Grandma always said it the other way.

  “Good Lord, what notions you children get!” Grandma looked up to the ceiling, clenching her fists, whispering, “Give me strength.” Grandma stood like that for a long time, sucking in breath and whooshing it out, sucking it in and whooshing it out. Finally, she leaned down close to Lynn and said, “Now, you don’t need to talk like this around your mother. She’s mighty upset already.” Grandma fiddled with the covers and pulled down another one over the foot of the bed. “You remember when we went to the courthouse—that was Thursday. Well, you took on awful bad when the judge talked to you—kicking and screaming so, we couldn’t get you settled down. Your grandpa had to help your mother get you outside.” Grandma shook her head. “What’s a big girl like you doing carrying on like that? You got so worked up, you made yourself sick, and we had to come on over here. So you can get some rest.”

  While Grandma talked, Lynn closed her eyes. She saw the bald man again, leaning down toward her where she sat in a high, hard chair, crying, trying her best to stand up in the chair so she could make the judge hear what she was saying, but her black Sunday shoes were slick on the bottom and they kept sliding across the polished wood and catching in her skirt. “No,” she was saying to the judge, but he just kept on talking. “No,” she said louder, but he didn’t pay her any mind. “No!” she screamed, and then she was crying and slamming her fists. “No! No! No!” And then the judge was banging a hammer on the desk and Mother was grabbing her around the waist, pulling her out of the big chair, and somebody—it must have been Grandpa—tried to hold her feet.

  Daddy was there. Daddy was there and his face was red and wet and he was reaching out his arms toward her. She was reaching out to him, too, but the harder she reached, the further away she got. She screamed for him, screamed and screamed, and then somebody smacked her hard and splashed water in her face and she thought for a second she was in the lake again. Hot sweaty hands held her wrists and ankles and Mother leaned down across her, crying, “It’s all right, baby. It’s all right. You’re safe now. You don’t ever have to go with him again.”

  Now Grandma was stroking her hair and saying, “There, there, sugar.” The stroking felt nice, and Lynn could feel herself relaxing the way Daddy’s big yellow dog, Mr. Goldwater, did when she massaged his velvet ears.

  Since she was being quiet and good, not screaming like before, maybe Grandma would let her talk some, let her ask about some things, like why she couldn’t get her arms loose to push herself up, but she wanted more to talk about Daddy.

  “I want Daddy,” she said.

  Grandma stopped stroking Lynn’s hair, leaned all the way over the bed, and took her hard by the shoulders. “Don’t you be saying things like that. Don’t you upset your mother talking like that. You need to get it through your head that man’s a good-for-nothing.”

  Lynn started to cry. “I want Daddy. Where’s my daddy?”

  “Listen to me, girl.” Grandma was so close, Lynn could smell her cinnamon gum. “The judge decided it’s not safe for you to go back there anymore. And—that man, he’s to stay away from our house. You won’t see him again. He’s lost his rights to you.”

  Rights. What did that mean? For days and days after she had gone into the lake, she lay in her bed, listening to Mother talking in the living room to Grandma and Grandpa, or to someone on the telephone, and she kept saying, “He nearly drowned my little girl. I have to get his rights stopped.” After that, the next time Daddy came to get her to take her to the farm, Mother held her tight in the kitchen while Grandpa went to the door to make Daddy go away. It happened like that three times in a row, and since then, whenever Daddy was due, Mother told Lynn he had gone away and wouldn’t be coming for her.

  And then the other morning, Grandma came to get her up and helped her put on her Sunday dress instead of a school dress and told her they were going into town to the courthouse. “Grandpa’s already in the car, so you better scoot,” she said. Somebody knocked on the front door and Grandma said, “That’ll be Hazel.” Hazel was Mrs. Wyler, their next-door neighbor.

  Lynn waited until she could hear Grandma opening the door for Mrs. Wyler, and then she took her shoes and sat in the hall beside the doorway so she could hear what they were saying. “I don’t know how long we’ll be. Grace oughtn’t to be any trouble, so long as she’s got her beads and things to play with. I’ll come after her soon as we get back.”

  “We’re all praying for you,” said Mrs. Wyler.

  “Well, then pray the judge sees that man’s not fit to be around any child.” Grandma said good-bye to Mrs. Wyler, closed the door, then called out, “Lynn, c’mon now!”

  Always before, Lynn had liked the courthouse. Last spring, her class had taken a bus there, and while they stood on the stone steps, the teacher explained the columns were called Ionic. At school, when she’d first watched the filmstrip about Greek buildings, Lynn had decided she liked Corinthian columns best, but when she was able to stand right next to the courthouse columns with their scroll caps, she liked them better than the flowery Corinthians.

  This time, when she walked into the courthouse between Grandma and Grandpa, she was too nervous to notice the columns. No matter how much she asked, nobody would tell her why they had come. On the school trip, her class had gone into an empty courtroom and pretended to have a trial. She was the judge. This time, when Grandpa opened the courtroom door, Lynn could see there were people inside, including Mother, but when she tried to follow Grandpa, her grandmother held her back and pulled her over to a hard bench. “We’ll wait,” she said.

  They waited so long, Lynn’s bottom hurt, but Grandma wouldn’t let her take her book down on the floor so she could stretch out on her stomach. “You’ll muss your dress,” Grandma said. About the time Nancy Drew started worrying that something had happened to keep her father from joining her at the haunted mansion like they’d planned, Lynn hear
d her mother crying. Nobody else she knew cried like Mother, all stopped up and choking, holding her hand over her mouth like she was trying to stuff the sadness back in. Then Mother opened the door, her eyes puffy and her hands shaking, and said, “They’re ready for you now.”

  Grandma pushed her forward and Lynn went in. All the way at the end of the room, there was a bald man in black robes sitting behind the judge’s high desk, just as she had done. He wasn’t smiling, but he seemed friendly. He was motioning for her to come toward him. Beside the tall desk was a heavy wooden chair, the witness chair, and a man in a gray uniform was patting the arm of the chair, showing her she was to get in it. She passed between the two tables where in their play court Joey Beasley and Tim Jackson had sat, pretending to be lawyers. When she climbed up in the chair, she first looked past the tables to the benches, lined up like pews in church, and saw there weren’t so many people after all. Grandma and Grandpa sat together on a bench way in the back, and then, further up, on the other side, she saw Grandpa Dieter, Daddy’s daddy. She smiled and waved because she hadn’t seen him since the day at the lake, and he gave a little wave back and then looked down at his lap. Next to Grandpa Dieter was Daddy’s friend Vernon—in her head she had named him “Bear” because of the black hair that covered his arms and legs, and even his chest and his back. Vernon didn’t look at her.

  Daddy was sitting at the table on the right, beside a man she didn’t know. When Daddy looked up at her, his eyes were sad but his mouth was tight, like he was angry. Mother was sitting at the table on the left with another strange man, her eyes still puffy, her mouth a sharp slice of bloodred. Nobody smiled back at Lynn, and she felt her own smile slide away like candle wax.

  “There now,” Grandma said, patting Lynn’s leg through the blankets. “That’s a good girl to stay quiet.”

  Lynn was still too hot, but she didn’t say anything to Grandma. She was trying hard to remember, but all she could get were quick flashes—one picture she just barely had time to see, and then another, like slides clicking past in a dark classroom.

  The bald judge leaning toward her and asking her name.

  The bald judge asking her, “What were you doing before your father threw you in the lake?”

  The bald judge smacking his gavel down so hard she had to cover her ears. Him saying, “Calm down, child. Tell me the truth, now.”

  The bald judge, his face like a red balloon, smacking the gavel down over and over and yelling, “Order! Order! Sit down, girl! Sit down!” Not letting her tell the truth.

  The bald, sweaty-faced judge standing, pointing at her mother, saying, “Take this child out now!”

  After that, a swirl of voices and faces, hands on her and then not, like she was being sucked up in a tornado, like Dorothy Gale from Kansas. No one would believe her. No one would listen to her. That was like Dorothy, too, except no beautiful witch in a shimmery dress came to quiet everyone down so Lynn could tell her story.

  “We were playing,” she tried to tell the judge. Grandpa Dieter was grilling hot dogs. Vernon was sitting at the end of the dock, fishing. He always came with them when they went fishing. She was playing hide-and-seek with Daddy, and when he found her curled in the soft needles under a giant Christmas tree, veiled, she thought, under the low branches, she scrambled out and ran from him, squealing, toward the dock.

  “That’s slippery, Lynn!” Daddy panted out. “Lynney, STOP!”

  But she was too giggly and ran on. She did slide a little on the dock, and her foot scraped a nail. She started to cry, but the pain didn’t last more than a second. It vanished when Daddy scooped her up. He shook her a little and said, “You have to mind,” and then they were both laughing and he held her tightly under her arms and swung her from side to side. “So, you want to be a rotten girl?” he said. “You know what happens to rotten girls?” He swung her high to the right and even higher to the left. She was scared. She yelled, “Too high, Daddy! No! Daddy! Don’t let go!” But Daddy was still laughing. He didn’t hear her. He swung her higher still, laughing. “Rotten girls go in the lake!” And he let go.

  She could remember a big smack, then darkness, then a second when she opened her eyes and saw the turtle paddle over her head. Then she was cold and there were people shouting at her and something pushing on her chest and something wet on her mouth and she choked and the air inside stung so much she opened her eyes and saw a big black bear on top of her. After that, she didn’t remember anything else until she woke up in her own bed, with Mother wiping her legs with a cold washrag.

  “Festus is coming on,” Grandma said, fussing with the covers again. “I’ll raise up the bed so you can see.”

  While Grandma rooted around for the switch, Lynn thought about how her Sunday school teacher once told her she could catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, so she concentrated on making her voice sweet. “Please, Grandma,” she said. “Can’t I call Daddy?”

  “Don’t start working yourself up again,” Grandma said.

  Lynn felt her eyes getting wet. She mustn’t cry. She mustn’t cry. “Please,” she said, “I won’t say anything to Mother. Please, Grandma. Let me call Daddy?”

  Grandma’s voice was vinegar. “I’ve told you and told you, child. You’re to forget about that man.”

  There was a little buzz and Lynn felt the bed raising her head and shoulders up. Now she could just see the outline of a telephone on a table past the foot of the bed. Beside the telephone was a vase with a single white rose, glowing blue from the light of the television, which hung from the wall above.

  Lynn didn’t care now how sour her voice sounded. “I’m gonna call him! You can’t stop me.” She couldn’t remember Daddy’s telephone number, but she knew she could dial zero. The operator would help her. She struggled to pull herself out of the bed, but her arms and legs were stuck. She pulled and pulled, so hard she was starting to lose her breath. Grandma was scurrying around the side of the bed, saying, “Stop that! Lynn, settle down right now!”

  Lynn lurched forward as far as she could. The pillow slipped to the middle of her back, and the last of the covers dropped from her shoulders to her lap. Thick straps were pulled tight across her arms, and now that she saw them, she could feel the same straps across her legs. “Let me go! Let me go!” she screamed. “I want Daddy! Let me go!”

  From somewhere outside her she heard Grandma calling for help. The white form of a nurse appeared, her shoes squeaking across the floor. The nurse would help her. “Please let me go,” Lynn whimpered. “Please.”

  “I’m going to put you back down, honey,” the nurse said, and the bed grumbled its way flat again. “Just a little stick.”

  It wasn’t a little stick at all, and Lynn tried to roll away from it, but the straps stopped her. She tried to think about how she could get away. Maybe like Houdini. But she couldn’t think how to begin. If only Daddy knew where she was. If only Daddy would come for her.

  The heaviness settled over her, pushing, pushing. Pushing her down like before. Down and down, under the water.

  THIRTEEN

  Upheaval

  February 1966

  Indianapolis, Indiana

  MABEL

  ONCE AGAIN, VIETNAM HAD MADE the cover of Life. A pair of soldiers in a trench—one, in spite of the great dirty bandage covering his eyes, looked up at the sky, perhaps hoping for a helicopter, while on his leg he cradled the other soldier, whose wounded head was mummy-wrapped, with only a triangle of face left free.

  Though it was much too cold, especially since she hadn’t put on a coat when she stepped outside to get the mail, Mabel sat down on the porch swing and opened the magazine. Inside, there were five more full spreads of photographs. She studied them, trembling. Though none of the faces was familiar to her, every one of them called up the faces of her boys—the seventy-two soldiers she had photographed in the last three months.

  The project had come to her one day on her lunch hour, when she was on her way into Fleming & Sons to
pick up some stockings. A display of official military portraits filled the store’s front window, lined up by the dozens, as if in regiments. By design, the portraits all looked the same—crisp uniform, rigid posture, staring, absent eyes. And terrifying youth—they all had that in common. But there was nothing, not so much as a wrinkle of a lip, to say that this boy is not the same as that one, or that one, or that one. Seeing the photographs, Mabel forgot entirely about the stockings and walked straight back to the desk she shared with three other photographers at the Indianapolis Star. A few moments later, she had scratched out an advertisement offering a free photo session to any serviceman with orders for Vietnam, in exchange for his agreement to let her photograph him once more when his tour of duty had ended. She had meant the ad to run in ten consecutive issues, but by the third day, she was so overwhelmed with calls, she canceled it. Since then, word of mouth had taken care of the rest.

  “Mama!” Daisy called from the kitchen. “What do you want to do with all these jars on the top shelf?”

  Mabel sighed and went back into the house. The whole idea of this move—an idea Daisy and Barry had cooked up, apparently when they were on their honeymoon—was to make Mabel’s life easier, get her into a place small enough to keep clean, a place with an efficient kitchen, where everything was in easy reach, a place where she didn’t have to face stairs when she wanted to get into her studio and darkroom. So what if her knee gave out a little? she argued. Using the stairs was probably the only thing that had kept the knee from locking up altogether. Besides, she was settled. She liked her neighbors, and the people who worked at the small local grocery all greeted her by name. But then, after Daisy and Barry had shown Mabel the house they’d found for her, two blocks from their own, pointing out how the spare bedroom and bath could easily be converted for her work, her daughter had clinched the deal by saying, “You don’t want to have to come all the way across town every time you want to hold your grandchild, do you?” Before Mabel knew it, she was nodding agreement through her tears and the house was bought.