The Sisters

by Nancy Jensen

  In the beginning, they were linked by their shared bitterness toward Rainey for having kept them apart, but after a while, when Lynn realized her mother could no longer wield that power, the anger fell away, taking the bridge between her and Daddy with it. Whenever they met, after the first few excited hours, there was nothing to talk about. Daddy had no interest in politics—he didn’t watch the news or even take a daily paper—and Lynn thought she’d go mad if she had to sit through another car race or listen again while Daddy held forth on the idiocy of people who overfed and overpetted their guard dogs. She could see he was bored when she talked about her classes, and even her announcement that she was to graduate with highest honors didn’t impress him much. At this same news, Mother had alternately wept and giggled for two days, and that whole summer after, whenever Mother ran into someone she hadn’t spoken to for some time—despite her feelings about Lynn’s visits to her father—she told the tale of her brilliant daughter, first in her university graduating class.

  Daddy wasn’t any more impressed when Lynn was accepted into law school—he said lawyers made him think of termites, feeding off trees felled by storms. “Well,” she told him, “the acceptance doesn’t matter much. There’s no money to pay for it.” She had applied for the few fellowships the law school offered, but she’d done her research, and she knew these never went to girls from working-class families. She’d been able to pay for college by patching together awards from speech competitions and small scholarships from the university, her high school, local civic clubs, and the electric company. Grandpa made up the rest by cashing in the last of his war bonds, and, for spending money, Mother gave her what little she’d saved in hopes of one day buying a house.

  “I’ll take care of it for you,” her father told Lynn, but he said it as if he were buying her a longed-for toy, not because he admired her ambition or intelligence. A year or two later, upset from a fight she’d had with her mother, she learned from Grandma Bertie that Rainey had spent months trying to borrow the money Lynn needed for law school, going to every bank in southern Indiana, only to be turned away time and again as a bad risk.

  But at least, Lynn had told herself back then, clinging to the eight-year-old inside her, he’s mine. Daddy’s mine. She didn’t have to share him with Grace, as she’d had to share Mother, Grandma, and Grandpa—knowing always, always, they preferred her younger sister. Though it shamed her now to think of it, especially when she thought of her love for Sam and Taylor, as a young woman she’d been happy to find her father alone in the world. Their need for each other, she had believed then, would weld them together. She and Daddy were family—and over time she trusted they would prove this by coming to know each other’s secret selves.

  Lynn waited—visit after visit, she waited—for her father to tell her who he was, what he really cared about. She’d even prodded him once, gently, by describing the photograph she remembered. In it, she was standing in front of a Ferris wheel with Daddy and another man, who held up two fingers behind her head, for devil’s horns.

  “He was a big man, I remember—like a bear,” Lynn said. “I think I was a little afraid of him.” And jealous, she thought, but she didn’t say it.

  “That must have been Vernon,” Daddy said. “Good fella.” He shifted in his chair and looked straight into Lynn’s eyes for a moment. “It’s on account of him you’re sitting here—alive, I mean. He knew how to do that mouth-to-mouth stuff—got you breathing again after we fished you out of the lake.” He took a swallow of his beer and looked at his watch. “The race’ll be on in a minute.” He started to stand up, but Lynn caught his hand.

  “What happened to him? Vernon? Do you still see him? Were you … friends?”

  “Lost track of him years ago,” Daddy said. “Just disappeared from town one day.”

  He said nothing more about it—not then. Not ever. And not once in all their time together—even in Daddy’s last year, when he was dying and she moved him into her house in Indianapolis to take care of him—did her father ever tell her what his real relationship with Vernon—or with Mother or anyone else—had been. Daddy died without Lynn’s ever knowing for sure if he was a man who preferred men, as the long-ago gas station attendant had told Derek, or if the talk that had cost him his job, his friends, and the custody of his daughter was only that—talk.

  Those years of trying to join herself with her father had driven such a great wedge between her and Mother that, at times, the old bruises still ached. Once, Lynn had divided a sheet of paper with a heavy black line and labeled one column Mother and the other column Daddy. She wanted to see clearly, in writing, what aspects of herself—her nature, her desires, and her accomplishments—she owed to each of her parents, but she tore up the paper, angry at the balance sheet, when she could think of nothing to write under Daddy but law school. That in itself was enormous—she wouldn’t be who she was now without it—but still, she couldn’t help but wonder: If she had been brought up in her father’s house, if he had been the one in charge of guiding and encouraging her, would she have cared for school, would she have been able to imagine any future for herself beyond rural mud?

  Lynn now tried to imagine little Julianne Howard as a young woman of eighteen or twenty, struggling to soothe the scars that love—so much possessive love—was now searing onto her, trying to appease whichever parent or parents the court had finally declared to be her true owner, while perhaps also trying to link herself again somehow to the family that was lost.

  Sam flicked Lynn’s big toe to get her attention. “Get you anything else, Judge?”

  Lynn swung her feet back to the floor, kissed Sam’s cheek to thank him for trying. “Better go write my ruling,” she said.

  She closed the door to her study, tapped the keyboard to wake up her computer, then picked up a legal pad and settled in the window seat. The red leaves of the oak tree, where they’d had a tree house built for Taylor, darkened against the gray clouds that were coming in. If it rained, most of the leaves would be on the ground by tomorrow morning. Funny. She couldn’t remember ever seeing Taylor in that tree house—they’d planted roses along the fence so the scent could waft up to her—but she’d heard Taylor talk about it nostalgically with her friends, and Lynn wondered if she still sometimes took her homework up there on warm afternoons. She was probably too old for that now.

  At the top of the legal pad, Lynn wrote Ortiz v. Howard. She pressed the tip of her pen on the page, but she couldn’t think what the first sentence would be, let alone the second or third or beyond.

  The Howards were good parents. There was no evidence otherwise. But the Howards’ lawyer had tried to argue that Julio Ortiz wasn’t fit—first, because he hadn’t filed an immediate challenge to the erroneous birth certificate, and, second, because he was unmarried and in the military. The lawyer had argued this because there wasn’t anything else to argue. Ortiz’s lawyer had proven that his client had not known about Casey Lockwood’s pregnancy until she wrote him a taunting e-mail, months after his deployment to Afghanistan, telling him she’d just signed away his two-day-old daughter. Lynn had studied the text of the e-mail, the validity of which Lockwood had confirmed in her testimony, sneering over how she had felt especially good about naming the kid after Julio while putting another guy’s name on the birth certificate as the father. Lockwood admitted she had never even dated the other man; he was just somebody who’d shared space once in a high school classroom.

  After receiving Lockwood’s e-mail, Ortiz had done everything he could from Afghanistan, which wasn’t much, but he had managed to get a lawyer to order a DNA test and, in the last three years, had submitted to half a dozen of them himself, both overseas and in the States, every one of them showing with statistical certainty that he was Julianne’s father. Ortiz was smart and methodical. He had kept every scrap of correspondence—paper and digital—and was able to prove that he had begun fighting for custody of Julianne from the moment he learned of her existence, even before he knew Casey
Lockwood had lied on the birth certificate. Ortiz was even able to show e-mails indicating he had told Lockwood many times that he wanted to have a large family. Ortiz’s lawyer argued that Lockwood, bitter that Ortiz had broken up with her just before being deployed, had taken her revenge by not telling him about the baby until she thought it was too late.

  In spite of having this evidence before them, the Howards refused Ortiz’s every request to see Julianne when he returned to Indiana in 2003. They justified their refusal by saying they didn’t want to take any chances that Julianne would become attached to him, since it was likely he would be redeployed within a year or two. In response to this, Ortiz, who, according to his parents’ testimony, had never wanted anything more than to be a marine, had decided he would not reenlist when his term of service ended early next year.

  Not that Ortiz was the irreproachable, wronged hero his lawyer tried to portray. There had been a lot of girls before Casey Lockwood, at least two others at the same time as Casey. He’d strung them along, giving them the impression that he was going to propose marriage. And his military career was undistinguished. He had the reputation of being a troublemaker, a malcontent, frequently on the edge of insolence toward his superior officers, doing what he could to fob off more dangerous assignments on other men. Though none of the fellow marines called as witnesses would say so directly, Lynn could see very well that had there not been a war on, Ortiz would not have been encouraged to reenlist, so his departure from the service was not really so self-sacrificing as he made out.

  From what she knew of them personally, she liked the Howards much better than Julio Ortiz, and though their decision to bar him from seeing Julianne was ill considered, Lynn understood it. She would have broken every law ever conceived to protect Taylor from harm. Perhaps Mother had felt that, too, for her.

  But this case was not a question of personality or feeling. And as a judge, Lynn could not consider desperate acts of love as justification for poor choices. The only truly relevant issue in this matter—since there was no evidence to suggest that Julio Ortiz would be a neglectful or abusive father—was that he had been denied his rights through Casey Lockwood’s actions. Lynn’s duty now was to right that wrong.

  She heard paper being slid under the door and caught a glimpse of Taylor’s glittering purple fingernails. “Honey,” she called. “Tay, that you?”

  The door opened just enough for Taylor to peek in. “I don’t want to bother you. I just thought you’d like to see this e-mail from Aunt Grace.”

  Lynn tossed the legal pad and pen onto the window seat and turned her face away long enough to compose it. She was annoyed, but she didn’t want Taylor to think she was the reason.

  “What’s it say?” Lynn stood up and motioned for her daughter to come all the way in.

  Taylor did, stepping carefully on her slender feet, as if afraid to make a sound. The girl picked up the paper and held it out to Lynn. “She just says to tell you she’s thinking about you and that she can send you a sword to balance your scales if you want her to.”

  Lynn pressed her lips together and stared at the page in her hand without reading it.

  “I think she meant to be funny,” Taylor said. “Aunt Grace always says stuff like that when things get serious. She also says she knows you’re a good judge and will make the right decision.”

  “I didn’t know you were in touch with her,” Lynn said. “Does she e-mail you a lot?”

  “A couple of times a week, I guess.” Taylor was looking at her cautiously now, measuring how much to say. She could cultivate that to become a good lawyer, if she could get her emotions under control.

  “You remember last Christmas she told us about her Web site? I found it one day and e-mailed her to tell her I liked it. You ought to see it,” Taylor said, forgetting to parse her words, her voice becoming lighter and quicker. “She’s got this thing on there that lets you pick a body you think looks like yours—of course you can pick any body you want—and then you can put a picture of your own head on top and drag over pieces of armor to see how you look as a knight.”

  “Does she?”

  “It’s fun.” Taylor was growing nervous again. “I like Aunt Grace. She really helped me with that paper I had to write last spring about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—you know, the part where Gawain gets ready to leave on his quest and there are all these lines about his armor—his horse’s, too.”

  Lynn nodded as if she did know, but she didn’t. Who was Sir Gawain? “I would have helped you with your paper.”

  Taylor looked down and buried her hand in her short black hair. She’d done that since she was a little girl, hung on to her hair when she felt embarrassed, dipping her head to hide the way her milky caramel skin flushed a shade darker. “I hated to ask you. It’s just, you’re always so busy. You have too much to do as it is.” Taylor started to hum softly, another nervous habit.

  Lynn picked up a folder from her desk and paged through it. “So what was your paper about?”

  “You mean the one about Sir Gawain? Aunt Grace explained what all the pieces of the armor were, why they were important, how the design shows the way he thinks about himself—and then she showed me how the Green Knight never wears a harness—the armor isn’t a suit, she says; it’s a harness. Anyway, I got the paper from that. Mr. Quentin really liked it. He said everybody else just wrote about what he’d already explained in class.”

  “Well,” said Lynn, pulling open the silver box on the desk to see if she’d left her reading glasses there. She hadn’t. “I’m glad Grace’s occupation has some value.”

  “Oh, you ought to see the prices of the stuff she makes. Just one helmet. She says she’s got so many orders, she’s had to give up her farrier’s work—that’s putting shoes on horses—for all except her oldest customers.” Taylor still clutched her hair, but she tried a small smile. “You really ought to take her up on that offer of a sword, Mom. Sounds pretty valuable.”

  Lynn folded her sister’s e-mail, pressing a crisp crease with her fingertips. “Thank you for bringing this in, sweetheart. I really do have to write my ruling now.”

  Taylor looked down to the floor and hummed again. What was that tune? When Lynn caught the next phrase, she knew. It was the tune Taylor had invented herself, a tune she’d invented to turn her name, TannaRayla, into a musical pacifier. Even before they brought her home, Lynn and Sam had been teaching their daughter to think of herself as Taylor. It was for her own good, they told each other. To let her be TannaRayla would only make her an outsider once she started school. It was important she fit in. Lynn remembered bragging to a colleague that Taylor loved her new name: She answered to it immediately, Lynn said, and wore proudly the gold locket engraved with it. Months after that, on the nanny’s night off, when Lynn passed Taylor’s room, she heard a muffled tune. She thought Taylor had turned her CD player down low, so she opened the door to check. The music was coming from Taylor herself. She was lying with her face to the wall, curled up, the covers pulled up to her eyes, and she was rocking in rhythm to her tune, singing to herself, TannaRayla … TannaRayla … TannaRayla. Lynn stepped out into the hallway again and closed the door. She had never told Sam about it. She’d never told anyone about it.

  But here was the tune again, just under Taylor’s breath.

  “I better get to school,” Taylor said. She turned to go, then stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “Are you giving her back, Mom?”

  Lynn held her arms open, catching Taylor by the shoulders as she approached. Looking into her daughter’s dark, dark eyes, she said, “I wish I could tell you, baby, but I really can’t. You’ll just have to wait to hear it on the news, like everybody else.” When Taylor reached up for her hair, Lynn caught her hand and held it gently in her own. “Now, just think about it,” she said. “Do you believe it’s right that you should know before the Howards and Mr. Ortiz do?”

  Tears sparkled in the corners of Taylor’s eyes. She looked to the floor again and shook h
er head.

  “All right, then,” Lynn said. “You go on to school and I’ll see you at dinner.”

  When the door closed, Lynn sat down at her desk. Her computer had gone to sleep again. She tapped a key. She’d just write it on the computer this time, and if she got stuck, she’d go back to the legal pad.

  Maybe she ought to anticipate her detractors and resign her seat, citing family reasons—no one questioned those. She’d talk to Sam about it next week, after the media had forgotten about this case and were busy mucking around in somebody else’s business. She would talk to Sam, yes, and Sam would tell her, just as he did every time she doubted herself, that her resigning would be a betrayal of the public trust. And of course he would be right. She couldn’t do that—wouldn’t do that—to the people who’d put her into office.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Gathering

  June 2007

  Pilgrim’s End, Indiana

  BERTIE’S GIRLS

  RAINEY STOPPED THE CAR AT the crossroads. Was she supposed to turn right, past the brown-and-white cows standing behind their fence, or was it left, between the two broad fields of ankle-high corn?

  “Where did you put those directions?” Lynn said, sliding her hand along the space between the seats. “We could wander around out here forever. No road signs. Grace should have come out to the highway to meet us.” She punched the buttons on her cell phone. “No reception. Big surprise.”