The Sisters

by Nancy Jensen

  Thursday, 6:20 A.M.

  Bertie flailed her arms when the cold rush of the river splashed over her chest, up to her throat. Standing behind her, Mabel wound her arms tightly around her waist and clasped Bertie’s hands in her own. I’m here, Mabel whispered in her ear. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Bertie. Just hold on to me. Their friend Wallace waved from the riverbank. In church last Sunday, when Bertie turned pale over the announcement that her baptism was scheduled for the next service, Wallace waited until all the people congratulating her had moved away and said, Don’t you worry, little gal. He cupped her cheek in his hand and her heart popped with joy. I’ll be right there to dive in after you if you need me. The preacher had come up just then, and Wallace’s ears turned pink around the edges. Reverend Small hasn’t lost one yet, he said, slipping away with a final grin at Bertie.

  Wallace will save us, Bertie said to Mabel, who laughed and said, Don’t let the preacher hear you say that. He’ll toss us out as blasphemers.

  Reverend Small talked on and on, his arm raised, blessing her, but Bertie paid no attention, concentrating on Mabel’s beautiful hands that held hers, feeling Wallace keeping watch from the bank.

  Here we go, Mabel whispered, and they were down under the water, the sun above them oozing like a burst yolk.

  Come up now, Mabel said. “Come on now, Bertie. Come back to us. Come on. Attagirl.”

  Bertie shook the water from her hair and opened her eyes to a shadowed wall striped with sunlight. “You had us worried there,” said a slim girl wearing a hospital-green top that was too big for her. Her shining dark hair was cut short—a bob, they called it. The girl absently stroked Bertie’s arm while she looked at the machine beside the bed. “Better. Better. Looking better. Almost.” Then the girl smiled across the bed at Grace, who was standing, arms tightly crossed, as if she were freezing, eyes terrified. “Crisis over,” the girl said. “We just need to keep tabs on her.” She patted Bertie’s hand. “You’re soaked through, honey. I’ll get someone in here to bring you a clean gown and some dry sheets.”

  Grace disappeared for a moment and returned with a washcloth and a small basin of water. She soaked the cloth, wrung it out, and dabbed at Bertie’s face. “Don’t scare me like that, Grandma.”

  “You,” Bertie said.

  “I stayed the night.” Grace rinsed the cloth and wrung it out again. “That was the only way to get Mom to go home.”

  “K.” Bertie strained to listen to her own voice. She made an adjustment. “K?” she said, hearing the rise at the end she’d intended. “You? K?”

  Grace wiped Bertie’s throat with the cloth, careful not to get the bedclothes any wetter than they already were. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  Bertie looked her granddaughter straight in the eyes. With all her might, she managed the word, “Tell.”

  “Good job, Grandma. That’s two real words. You’ll be jabbering up a storm by tomorrow.”

  Bertie lifted one hand and folded it as well as she could to point a finger at Grace. “Tell. Me.”

  Grace put the cloth in the basin and pulled her chair beside the bed as she had yesterday. She always had to warm up to speaking, Grace did. Bertie knew the pattern—the eyes down, up, to the side, and down again; a hand at the back of her neck, then fingers lifting her hair and letting it drop; then the same hand sliding under her chin.

  “I’m thinking about leaving Ken,” she said.

  Bertie had never made any secret of how she felt about Ken—a brooding son of a gun, not nearly good enough for Grace, took advantage of her sweetness—so she didn’t try to say anything.

  “He won’t let me near him,” Grace said. “You know. I mean inside.”

  Bertie raised her eyebrows as high as she could.

  “Not that he ever really did.” Grace gathered the edge of the blanket in her fingers and worked it in tiny circles. Fidgeting was another of her habits. “When we were first together—I mean when we first moved out to the country—he kept busy fixing up the house, plowing up the garden. But now he just holes up in the spare room or the shed, or he goes off alone into the woods. He’s gone for days sometimes. Weeks.” She laid her head for a moment on the bed beside Bertie and kissed the exposed skin on Bertie’s arm. “When he drinks, it’s not like when Grandpa would have too much.”

  “Leg,” Bertie said, and Grace nodded. Hans’s bad leg. Had she ever told him she understood about that? About how he had to drink because of the pain, which got worse as he got older. Bertie couldn’t remember.

  “Grandpa just got a little silly—you know, the way he’d sing that song he liked from Hee Haw, with all the groans? Ken gets…” Grace looked off toward the noises coming from the hall. “It’s Vietnam,” she said at last.

  Grace stood up and went to the window, spreading the slats of the blind open with her fingers. “It’s going to be a pretty day,” she said. “Should I open these?” She opened them without looking at Bertie and then she came back to her chair, now lit with the sun.

  “I’m just worn out with feeling useless, Grandma. Ken says I’m not. He says all the time that he needs me.”

  Bertie held out her hand. Grace took it and said, “I used to ask him to talk about the war, to help get it out of his head. He says he can’t, says anybody who wasn’t there can’t understand. And of course he’s right.” Grace sat up straighter in her chair and massaged her throat—the way she always did to keep from crying. “It’s not enough anymore,” she said. “For me. It’s like he was shot through, like he’s a sieve. Nothing can ever fill him up again. I’m tired.”

  “So, what are you two talking about?” Alma came in and stopped at the foot of the bed. She was wearing a crisp lemon-colored suit, so bright it hurt Bertie’s eyes. With her matching handbag, sprayed hair, prim makeup, and fragrance of roses, she could be on her way to meet the queen.

  Grace stood up to accept Alma’s touchless hug and air kiss. “Did you stay at the house with Mom last night?” Grace asked.

  “I left Ohio at three this morning,” she said. “I’d have come Tuesday, but your mother seemed to have everything under control, and Gordon had so many patients he needed to see.”

  “So Uncle Gordon’s here.”

  “No, no,” Alma said, coming to the side of the bed to pull Bertie’s blankets up to her neck. Bertie tried to wiggle them down again with her shoulders, but Grace saw her struggle and folded them back to her waist. Alma turned away to find a place to lay her purse. “I couldn’t say how long I’d have to be away, so Gordon thought he’d best stay home. He’ll come, of course, if there’s a real emergency.”

  That made Grace mad, Bertie could see, and with a small grunt, Bertie managed to stop her granddaughter from speaking her mind. Gordon wouldn’t drive down from McAllister unless she died, which everybody in the family well knew. He hadn’t come for years, not since his own mother had died, and that was just fine with Bertie.

  “And Milton?”

  That Grace: She had a way of still sounding polite while she sneered underneath.

  “Oh, he’s far too busy setting up his practice,” said Alma, chatting away as if she were trying to best some other mother at a garden party. “And there’s the house. He and Penny haven’t really settled in yet.” She came to the bed with a fine-tooth comb in her hand and started flicking at Bertie’s hair. “He’ll be glad to know you’re doing so well, Mother.”

  Grace caught Alma’s wrist. “The aides will be here in a minute to give Grandma a bath and change the bed. They’ll wash her hair and see to the tangles,” she said. “They’re gentle.”

  Two nurses’ aides appeared in the room, one carrying a bundle of linens and the other a plastic basin and a big sponge. “What do you say we make you more comfortable, Mrs. Jorgensen? Get you out of that sweaty gown and into some clean sheets?” Alma picked up her purse and said she would go downstairs for coffee.

  Bertie squeezed Grace’s hand as hard as she could, which wasn’t hard
at all, and when Grace began to pull her hand free, Bertie clutched at her fingers. “G … gace,” she said. Grace stopped, leaned down, and kissed Bertie on the forehead. “I’m not leaving you. I’ll be right outside the door.”

  Saturday, 5:15 P.M.

  Bertie checked to make sure the cook wasn’t watching, and she mounded up a double helping of mashed potatoes for Wallace. She dipped up a ladle of gravy and poured it over the potatoes and the roast beef and put the bread on another plate, since he liked to keep his bread clean of gravy until he was ready to sop his plate with it. When Bertie pushed through the kitchen door into the dining area, she stopped.

  Where were the wooden booths? Where was the counter with the cash register, and where was Doris, who never looked at people when she took their money? There was just one empty table beside the big window, which ought to have looked out on Main Street in Newman but instead gave a view of the Juniper train station, the Emmanuel Baptist Church, the high school—none of those places really close enough together to see all at once—and the barn with the doors open so she could just see Jim Butcher’s dangling, black-shoed feet. Covering the whole wall between the window and the door was a photograph of Mabel dressed in white lace, sitting on a swing, her long dark hair draped around her shoulders.

  Now the table was occupied, two nice-looking young men facing each other, playing cards. The thick-shouldered one with the dark blond hair, who had his back to her, twisted to see her and grinned. It was Wallace. When he turned again to the game, he moved just enough for Bertie to see it was Hans across from him. Hans looked at her too, like he did when they stepped out together to go to the pictures, eyes full of friendly hope.

  Bertie stood beside the table between them, trying to follow the game. There were rules and plays she couldn’t understand. When the men both folded their cards and stood to shake hands, she still didn’t know who had won. Wallace turned to leave, and Bertie took his arm. He stopped, kissed her cheek with lips like cool water, and very gently unhooked her arm from his and placed it tenderly around Hans’s waiting arm. Wallace vanished out the door, somewhere into Juniper, and though Bertie looked and looked through the window, she couldn’t see him anywhere. Sorrow welled inside her, until she thought she would be drowned by it.

  Then Hans took her in his arms and rocked her. Rocked her until all she could think of was how solid he was, how like a small warm house smelling of freshly sawn wood.

  I love you, she said. But she didn’t say it. It was only in her mind. She tried again and again because she wanted him to know, but her voice wouldn’t obey her. Still Hans rocked her, but she could feel him vanishing, as Wallace had vanished before him. She struggled to speak. She had to say the words so he could hear them before he disappeared.

  Bertie clenched her fists, concentrated and clenched every muscle in her body to help push the words out. “Ove you.”

  “She’s waking up,” a woman’s voice said.

  “She’s just talking in her sleep,” said another woman’s voice, tight and sour.

  “I love you, too, Gran,” said the first voice. “I think you’re right. She must be dreaming.”

  “Well,” said the bitter second voice. “At least you give me credit for a little sense.”

  Hans was gone now, along with the window, the table, and Mabel. Bertie tried to pull herself from the darkness, toward the voices.

  “Why did you come? Just tell me that.”

  “Because I wanted to see Grandma.”

  “Oh, yes. You think she might die, you come for a day.” The bitter voice was Rainey’s.

  “I would have come sooner, Mother, but you told me yesterday morning she was getting better.”

  “That’s my point. Your grandmother gets a little better, starts talking again, and you decide to stay put. That asshole has a bellyache, you move him in with you.”

  “It was cancer,” Lynn said. “Daddy’s been dead for almost two years.”

  “Well, all I know is, you’d never come for me. No more than two hours away, but it’s years. Years, and you haven’t been back here to see me—just to see me—even once. There’s always some other excuse, to see your grandmother or to go to a reunion—never just to visit your mother. You’re only here now because of her. You’d never think about how maybe I need you here to help me.”

  Bertie could hear Lynn’s voice knotting up. “I have to work, Mother. Grace and Aunt Alma are here. What more do you want? I can’t just walk out on my clients. Really, you don’t have any concept of how busy I am.”

  Bertie couldn’t quite see clearly, but she could see the back-and-forth, back-and-forth movement by the window. Rainey was pacing. “Oh, well, how could I? What do I know about the life of a lawyer? You’ve always thought I was an idiot.”

  “I never said that.”

  “I’d just like a little respect for once.”

  Lynn was angry now. “And you don’t think I would? Do you ever put yourself in my shoes, think about what it was like for me trying to explain to my friends that my own mother wouldn’t come to my law school graduation?”

  “That was your doing, not mine.” Rainey was crying. “I wanted to be there. But I was not going to sit in the same room with that—”

  “It’s been thirty years, for God’s sake. More than that! Whatever you think he did to you, can’t you just drop it?”

  For a moment there was silence, broken only by the sound of pacing and angry, exhausted breaths.

  “Besides,” Lynn said, “why the hell shouldn’t Daddy have been there?”

  Rainey’s voice was oily black. “One has to pay the piper, I suppose.”

  “So what are you saying? You’d rather I be like Grace—no education, stuck in a shack in the woods with some nut, scraping a living from making goat cheese and chain mail?”

  “Well, Grace didn’t have a father to pay all the bills for her.”

  “And whose fault is that, Mother?”

  “Nnno!” Bertie couldn’t let this go on. Stop, she wanted to say. Forgive. Forgive. But all she could manage was “Gv.”

  Lynn was at her side now and Rainey at the foot of the bed. “Grandma, what is it? What do you need?”

  “Gv,” Bertie said again, suddenly in fury at her own body for paralyzing her this way.

  “She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Rainey said. “This has happened before. You haven’t been here to see it.”

  “Liuh.”

  Bertie felt Lynn’s touch on her shoulder. “Yes, we love you, too,” Lynn said.

  “Liuh. Riah.” Bertie shook her head in frustration.

  “I think she wants to ring for the nurse,” Rainey said, coming now to the other side of the bed and pressing the call button.

  Bertie groped in the air, trying to catch at Lynn’s hand. Oh, where was Grace? Grace would make them understand. “Gace,” she said.

  At last, Lynn’s hand closed over hers. But when Bertie tried to pull Lynn’s hand toward Rainey’s, Lynn released her grip and Bertie groped the air again.

  “Her face is getting all red,” Lynn said. “Where’s that nurse?” She reached across the bed and pressed the call button.

  Bertie waved both her hands now, trying hard to make them move toward each other, as a signal to Lynn and Rainey, but the hands moved by some wild design of their own that had nothing to do with her will.

  “Mother, try to calm down,” Rainey said. She was staring anxiously at the machine beside the bed. “Please, try to calm down.”

  “Yyou,” Bertie said. The ceiling pressed down on her chest and she was being pushed deeper into the bed, through the mattress, down and down and down.

  “Yy … gv.” She was crying now, dry tears deep inside. Lynn and Rainey still stood beside her, but she was vanishing like Wallace, like Hans, like Mabel.

  Somewhere far above her, a small red light pulsed, and there was a wailing sound, like a high, long scream, holding and holding and holding on the air, but all the time fainter until it was so fa
int it was only the memory of sound.

  TWENTY

  Accounting

  Late Winter 1994

  Cincinnati, Ohio

  ALMA

  February

  ONCE AGAIN, A FIGURE APPEARED in the waiting room door, and Alma put down her magazine to look up in hope, but it wasn’t Milton. This time it was another young man, twenty-five at most, wearing a faded yellow hospital smock that had been pulled on hastily over his bloodred T-shirt. His face shining with sweat, he stood speechless until a middle-aged couple noticed him and leapt up, crying in unison, “Boy or girl?” Tangled in an embrace, they all three managed to wedge back through the door to scurry off down the hall, laughing and crying.

  For the first time since her 4:00 A.M. arrival, Alma was alone in the waiting room. Milton had called them in McAllister a little before one o’clock to say Penny had gone into labor, three weeks early, and that they were on their way to the hospital. “Meet me there,” her son had said, and she’d started flinging clothes into her suitcase while Gordon was still trying to wake up enough to grasp the news.

  “It’s probably a false alarm,” Gordon said. “I’m not driving two and a half hours to Cincinnati in the middle of the night for a false alarm. They’ll have sent her back home before you get there.” He rolled toward the wall, pulling the blankets over his shoulder. “What do they need you for anyway?”

  “You go back to sleep,” Alma said. She was too happy to try to reason him into happiness. A baby! Her grandchild. “I’ll call you when I get there.”

  “It’s over.” Milton now stood in the waiting room door. His voice was dry. “A girl.”

  “Milton!” Alma went to him, lifting her arms to wrap around his neck, but then she thought better of it. Her son had never liked being hugged. With a quick, light touch on his arm, she said, “A girl—how wonderful!”