The Sisters

by Nancy Jensen

  When the man before her stepped into the sunlight pooling at the center of the porch, Lynn recognized his frost blue eyes. “Daddy,” she said.

  The man came closer, testing each step, as if the floor might dissolve under his feet.

  “Daddy. It’s me.”

  “Lynney?”

  There it was, right before her, so close she could see a multitude of tiny lines—the sad, loving face of her dreams.

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  She held out her arms as in the dream and closed her eyes, struggling to trap the image of him, like a saint’s portrait inside a knight’s shield.

  “Lynney Lou?”

  Suddenly his arms were around her, squeezing her so tightly her sobs clogged inside her ribs. She pressed her arms against his back, imagining herself small again, so small she nearly disappeared against his broad chest, imagining all that had happened going backward, undoing itself—her nightmare cries, gone, for there was no nightmare. The weeks in the hospital, gone. The courtroom, gone. Everyone except the two of them, gone. Everything gone—until she was back with him on the lake, hiding under the giant Christmas tree, popping out, laughing as he chased her, him scooping her up and swinging her, laughing. Swinging her, laughing with her. And this time—this time—he wouldn’t let go.

  SIXTEEN

  Turnings

  March 1979

  Newman, Indiana

  RAINEY

  RAINEY OPENED THE DOOR TO the bedroom without knocking. In spite of the midday sun that poured through the window and flooded the desk, Grace was bent under the blazing lamp, curling long strips of gold wire into tiny, tedious spirals with a pair of needle-nose pliers. Rainey couldn’t see the point of it—Grace would ruin her eyes and her small, pretty hands—but she had to admit that when Grace linked several dozen variously sized spirals to make a bracelet or necklace, the creation was lovely. There was a word for it, a word that sounded like the tinkling of high notes on a piano—filigree.

  Instead of putting up posters of rock stars or photographs of friends like other girls, Grace had covered the walls on her side of the room with panels of velvet-covered corkboard—glistening emerald, ruby, amethyst—on which she displayed an ever-changing arrangement of elaborate jewelry. Grace sold enough pieces at school to buy more supplies, but her grades this term—except for her art class—weren’t very good. Rainey had been meaning to talk with her about that—the grades. Grace needed to bring them up if she was going to get into college. That was another thing they needed to talk about—Grace’s frivolous plan to study art instead of something sensible like computers—but it would have to wait. Rainey had other things on her mind.

  “Grace,” Rainey said, standing behind her daughter’s chair.

  “Mmm?” Grace didn’t look up from her work. She was completing a very delicate link, more complicated than what she’d done before, or at least it seemed so to Rainey. Grace had curled the wire on both ends, toward the middle, creating two large spirals in the center, each doubling back and looping out toward the ends into smaller spirals—like two treble clefs on their backs, touching toes.

  Grace showed no sign of stopping, so Rainey said, “Put that down, please. I want to talk to you.”

  Grace set her tools on top of the sketch she’d made of the finished piece and folded her hands on the desk. Rainey leaned in to look at the sketch—grand enough for royalty, very impractical for any modern young woman. She wouldn’t be able to sell that one, not even for prom.

  “Grace!” With two rigid fingers, Rainey tapped smartly on her daughter’s shoulder, and at last the girl switched off the lamp and scooted her chair in a half turn toward the center of the room.

  Preambles made Rainey impatient, especially when she had something serious to say, so she sat down on the edge of the bed and faced Grace with a hard stare. “I want you to tell me everything you know about your sister.”

  A flicker of a satiric smile nudged the corners of Grace’s lips. Rainey wasn’t going to take that nonsense. “You know what I’m talking about,” she said sharply.

  Grace opened her mouth, then closed it and rubbed at the depressions the wire had made in the pads of her fingers.

  “It’s no good trying to lie for her,” Rainey said. It was this point that made her especially angry. Grace and Lynn had never been close, Lynn lording it over Grace all her life, trying to make her feel stupid, just as she did with everyone else, so Grace’s loyalty ought not to be with her sister, but with her mother.

  Rainey pressed. “I know she’s been sneaking away from college to see—” She couldn’t bring herself to say her father. She started to say that asshole, but she’d noticed the word made Grace fold inward. Rainey went on: “—to see that thing known as my ex-husband.” Her shudder of disgust was partly real, partly exaggerated to show Grace how upset she was at Lynn’s betrayal.

  “Did Lynn tell you that?”

  “You know perfectly well she did not.”

  “How could I know?” Grace shrugged and looked at Rainey as if to ask another question—one Rainey didn’t want to answer. Grace would ask, What makes you so sure Lynn even knows where he is? and Rainey didn’t want to say that one day last week, when Lynn was home on spring break, she had read Lynn’s journal straight through while Lynn was out with friends.

  She had learned a great many things about her elder daughter—for one, just how much time Lynn spent running around to scream about rights: rights for women, rights for the Haitian boat people, rights for trees and for the ozone layer, rights to be safe from nuclear power. Rainey had learned, too, that Lynn was sleeping with her boyfriend—that Derek, who sneered when he said, “Yes, Mrs. Brandt,” or “No, Mrs. Brandt,” so full of his own importance. And she had learned that somehow, some way, Alma—her own sister—had had a hand in Lynn’s sneaking. Everyone, it seemed, had turned against her.

  “Lynn didn’t tell me,” Rainey said, proud of how calmly she spoke but still wanting Grace to know she was angry. “Of course you didn’t, either. Never mind how I know. I do, and you’re going to tell me what you know about it.”

  Grace tucked a stray, stringy brown lock back up into the headband that held her hair out of her eyes while she worked. She said nothing.

  “Grace. Tell me. How long has she been sneaking around? How does she get down there?”

  Grace stalled, rubbing at the back of her neck, looking up to the ceiling, down, to the side. When at last she leveled her gaze at Rainey, there was a flash of defiance. “I don’t know if it counts as sneaking.”

  “Well, what else would you call it, I’d like to know?” Rainey’s voice grew shrill. “She’s gotten down there somehow, time after time. Without a word to me—lying to me outright. Making up stories about where she’s been.”

  Grace’s clear stare chilled Rainey. “You think she needs your permission? To see her father?”

  Rainey began to shake. She clutched at the bedspread, trying to compose herself. “The judge ordered…”

  “Lynn’s over twenty-one, Mother.”

  “She wasn’t twenty-one when all this started.” Rainey could feel her argument, so carefully imagined, slipping out of her grasp.

  “Yes, she was,” Grace said.

  “So you do know when she went the first time!” Rainey stood up and turned her back on Grace. She couldn’t look at her, not right now. “What does age have to do with it anyway? Is that a license to lie?” She tried to trace the pattern of a chained collar pinned on the wall before her, but it eluded her, breaking its rhythm every time she thought she’d unlocked its secret. Then she saw it: the wire twined like overgrown rose vines, but there were no blossoms—only a tangle of thorns. “He’s hypnotized her, hasn’t he? Making big promises about sending her to law school?” That was all over Lynn’s journal, too. Pages of it. Rainey could feel Grace, behind her, measuring her words.

  “I really don’t think this is any of my business, Mother. Or yours.”

  Rainey wheeled around, arms cr
ossed, the collar forgotten. “Anything your sister does that affects this family is my business. Like sneaking.”

  “And what would you have done if she had told you?”

  “I would have stopped her!” How dare her own child question her like this? She should walk out of the room, come back when she had regained her calm, but she plunged on. “I’d have pulled her out of school if I had to. Kept her here until she swore never to go again. I would have protected her.”

  “From what?” Grace picked up the link she’d just made and turned it in her fingers. “You would have made her a prisoner? For how long?”

  “No! Stop twisting my words.” Rainey could feel the tears pushing at her eyes. “You learned that from your sister.” She pressed her fingertips against her closed lids. “He’s just going to build her up, make her think he’s going to pay all the bills, and then he’ll pull it all out from under her. It’s a trick. Don’t you see?”

  “And why would he do that, Mother? What would he get out of it?”

  “He wants to hurt her again! He wants to get at me.” She reached for Grace’s hand. “Please, help me. Help me. Help me make her understand what a liar he is—he’s a snake, Grace.”

  Turning her chair back to the desk, Grace said quietly, “You think she’ll listen? You’ve already given it a lifetime—two lifetimes. Three, if you count yours.”

  Rainey grabbed Grace’s shoulders, trying to pull her around again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Grace twisted from Rainey’s grasp, propped her elbows on the desk, and let her head drop wearily into her waiting hands. “For as long as I can remember—for as long as Lynn can remember—you’ve run him down. Looking for every chance to insult him, telling us how horrible he is.”

  “He was. He is.”

  Grace laid her head on the desk and closed her eyes. How sweet she looked that way. Innocent. Until now, Rainey hadn’t realized how cruel her younger daughter could be—how secretive she was, how stealthily she could cut, like the thorns of a rose.

  Eyes still closed, Grace said, “So why not tell us what it was that made him so awful? So we could decide for ourselves.”

  “Grace—have you been going down there, too? Don’t lie to me. Have you? What’s he been promising you?”

  Grace sat up, shaking her head. “Why would I go, Mother?”

  Rainey backed away and sat down on the bed again. “All I ever wanted was to keep you girls safe.” She was losing her battle against her tears. “Safe from all the bad things in life, from knowing.…” She dug a wadded Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose.

  “Safe from what?” Grace turned to stare out the window. “What exactly?” The sun had gone behind the clouds and the bare branches waved in the rising wind, as if struggling to touch. “Don’t you think it hurts to be without a father?”

  Rainey found another Kleenex and blew her nose again. “Your grandpa is the best father anyone could want.”

  Grace glared at her. “You don’t get it, do you? Of course we love Grandpa. But he’s your father, not ours.” She picked up the spiral link and flung it at the window. “Why do you expect us not to want one?”

  Rainey held her head erect. “I expect you to trust me. To show me some respect.” She dabbed a remaining tear from her cheek. “There were a lot of things I wanted,” she said. “Things I never got. Things I gave up for the two of you. I think that deserves something.”

  “You can’t make somebody else pay for what you lost,” Grace said. “Or you shouldn’t, anyway. Lynn just wants to find out for herself. If the man’s the mess you say he is, she’ll figure it out soon enough.”

  When Rainey opened her mouth to answer, a wail rose from deep inside her, turning her inside out, robbing her of her bearings. Children thought it was so easy, so easy to lay out simple reasons, like lines on a highway—not the way it really was, like trying to untangle one of Grace’s golden chains. No—worse—as if someone had plucked all those webs from their velvet boards, thrown them inside a wheel, and turned that wheel for ten years, twenty, until they had become a single mass, knotted and crushed. Where could she begin any telling? With the baseball field? With the house in Siler—opening the bedroom door, the Vaseline jar on the pillow, the skewed pictures, and those … monsters? Or would it be better to leap forward to a hospital where a doctor told her there was no other choice but to tie her child to the bed, to fill her thready veins with drugs enough to bring down a giant? What if she started in between—with the drowning, the lies, the nightmares that told the truth? Or maybe she would begin just a few years ago, when Lynn’s fits suddenly vanished and she sealed up like a marble wall. Rainey sank to the floor, her back against the bed. She hugged herself against the pain, rocking. “You don’t know. You don’t know. You just don’t know.”

  Grace picked up a new piece of gold wire and started twisting it, but it broke in her hands. “That’s just it. We don’t know.” She tossed the wire onto the desk. “At least Lynn had a name to start with.”

  Shock stopped Rainey’s tears. “What are you talking about?”

  Grace wouldn’t look at her.

  “Grace? What do you mean—a name? You know his name. Grace?”

  Her daughter picked up the wire again and began turning a new shape with the pliers. “I know,” Grace said bitterly. “I know he’s not my father. Lynn told me. Years ago.” She gripped the tool so tightly her knuckles were white. “Maybe you’d like to tell me about that.”

  Rainey put a hand to her throat to steady her trembling voice. “No, Grace. Oh no. No.” She pulled herself up and grabbed her daughter’s arm—too hard—trying to make her turn. “You mustn’t.” She let go and said more quietly, “You mustn’t, do you hear me? You mustn’t ever try to find your father.”

  “How can I?” Grace’s voice was as concentrated as her skilled hands. “You won’t even tell me who he is.” She turned and stared at Rainey. “Are you going to tell me now that you’re keeping me safe? I guess he must be the biggest bastard that ever lived.”

  Rainey’s open hand, out of her control, slashed across Grace’s face.

  She stared, uncomprehending, at her stinging hand, and the angry mark on her daughter’s soft cheek.

  “I’m sorry! Oh, sweetheart,” Rainey cried, wrapping Grace tightly in her arms, kissing her hair. Grace sat stiff, unyielding. “I’m so sorry, Grace. Please. I’m sorry, baby.”

  When Rainey released her, Grace returned to her tiny, elaborate turnings of the wire.

  “Oh, Grace. My Grace. Your father,” Rainey said. “He was—lovely…” But even as the words still hung in the air, the sentence waiting to be finished, she knew there was no untangling Marshall, either. How could she explain that even before she had felt the first flutter of Grace in her womb, she had decided for all of them, decided to keep silent—decided to let everyone around them believe a lie—so that Marshall could stay on his path? And even if somehow she could explain, even if Grace in time could recognize the sacrifices Rainey had made—how? How could Grace not believe that she herself had been forced to pay the greatest part of the price?

  “He never knew about you,” Rainey said. “It was for the best. You have to believe me. Please, baby.” She rubbed Grace’s shoulders, but the girl wouldn’t have it. “He was good and kind, your father. And very smart. Isn’t that enough?”

  “No, Mother,” said Grace. “It’s not enough.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The New Man

  Summer’s End 1981

  Newman, Indiana

  GRACE

  HE HAD A GOOD SEAT, the new man, even better than Hiram, though she’d never say so out loud—not if she wanted to keep her job anyway. She did. Grace thought she’d heard Hiram call the man Ken when he first came to the stable a couple of weeks ago. They seemed to know each other—the way Hiram slapped his hand into the other man’s, pulling him in for a half hug; the way they laughed really loud and then put their heads close together, like men did when they
shared a secret or a dirty joke—and though Grace had been listening as closely as she could without seeming to, she hadn’t heard Hi call his friend, except that once, anything besides Crab.

  That first day, Hi had put him on Ashes, the big gelding, which made everyone at the stable gather around the ring, asking in whispers if maybe Hi had something against the guy, whether he was pulling some practical joke. Unsaddled, Ashes could be led by a child, but saddled, nobody except Hiram could hold the horse’s head—he fought the bit, even with Hi’s brother Merle, who had so many show trophies he’d taken to using the tall ones as stakes for his tomatoes and pole beans. But Hiram put his old friend on Ashes, and from the moment he entered the ring, the man held the horse high and tight. In every way they looked a team, and in the sun, the gleam of the horse’s coat, freshly curried, matched the shining pewter color of the man’s thick hair.

  This was the fourth time Crab had been to the stable, so he was old news to the men and women who spent their days there—he was a gifted rider, they’d give him that, but there wasn’t any need to act like he’d dropped from heaven to take a gallop on a unicorn. Still, Grace couldn’t resist watching him, and when he turned up, she would suddenly find work to do in one of the stalls that looked out on the ring. This morning, hoping the man would come, she’d left Delia’s stall for last. Hi had raised his eyebrows at her when he saw her skipping it to go on to the one next to it, but Grace said she figured since Delia had been taken off in a trailer at dawn to meet her stud, she had first better clean the stalls of horses who would be coming back by midmorning.

  From Delia’s stall, the outside window gave a clear view of the ring. As soon as she saw Ashes and his rider pass, Grace let the pitchfork drop in the straw and pushed open the wooden shutter to watch them. After two walks around the ring, they moved into a trot, then a canter, back to a walk, another canter, and then the man shouted to Hi, and they came out of the ring at a gallop and breezed past the barn.