The Space Between Sisters

by Mary McNear

  “Mostly they talk to each other,” Cassie said, concentrating on her drawing.

  Poppy considered this. She knew next to nothing about little boys. “What do they like to do?” she asked. “I mean, other than play with Legos?”

  Cassie hesitated. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “I think so,” Poppy said. God knew she’d kept one of her own long enough.

  “Sometimes,” Cassie said, “when my dad’s not around, my brothers blow things up.”

  “Blow things up?”

  Cassie nodded. “With firecrackers. I’ve seen them do it. Out in the woods. But I haven’t told anyone. I’m not a tattletale,” she added, proudly.

  “What . . . what kinds of things do they blow up?” Poppy asked.

  Cassie shrugged. “Plastic bottles. Apples. Stuff like that. Once they blew up a whole bag of flour. Everything in the forest around it was white afterwards.”

  “I’ll bet it was,” Poppy said. She looked out the kitchen window as Tim scrambled up the tree house ladder.

  “My dad says my brothers are part monkey,” Cassie commented, watching Tim. “I could go up there, too, if I wanted to. But I don’t want to. I’m not part monkey,” she added, seriously.

  “Neither am I,” Poppy said. “I’m afraid of heights.”

  “You are?”

  Poppy nodded. “When I was younger, my sister used to try to get me to jump off the boathouse roof at my grandparents’ cabin. I was too scared, though. But you know what?” she said. “It looked like fun. Sometimes, watching her, I was a little jealous.”

  “You were jealous of your sister?” Cassie asked, fascinated. She loved it when Poppy talked about her and Win.

  “Oh, definitely,” Poppy said, smiling.

  Cassie smiled back at her, and then, shyly, edged her drawing across the table to her. “Do you think this is good enough to put on the refrigerator, Poppy?”

  Poppy looked down at the drawing. It was of her and Cassie, both of them twirling batons. Cassie was wearing the costume she’d worn to the recital, and her hair was in a little bun, and Poppy was wearing the blouse and jeans she had on now, and her long hair was spilling across the page in a tidal wave of bright yellow magic marker.

  “This is definitely good enough to put on the fridge,” she told Cassie. “But do you think I could put it on my fridge? Just for a little while?”

  “Really?” Cassie said, her eyes wide.

  “Really. I mean, if that’s all right with you.”

  “It is.”

  “Good,” Poppy said. “It’ll be on loan to me, then. Don’t let me forget it when I go home.”

  Cassie started to say something, but Poppy didn’t hear it, because at that moment Tim, who was coming down the tree house ladder, slipped and fell to the ground. He yelped. Poppy was on her feet and out the kitchen door before he could even pick himself up.

  “You okay, Tim?” she asked, hurrying over to him. Inwardly she was relieved; he hadn’t fallen far and he hadn’t hit his head.

  But when he stood up, he looked positively ill. His face was chalk white and he was holding his right arm at a funny angle. Broken, she thought, with a tremor of fear and the first knife-edge of panic. But she caught herself. Get it together, now. You’re the adult here. And, miraculously, the fear and panic receded enough for her to take charge.

  “Can you move it, honey?” she asked Tim, kneeling down so that she was at his level.

  He tried, and winced. A tear slid down his cheek. “It hurts too much,” he said. Hunter came down the ladder now and stood beside his brother. He looked scared. And soon Cassie, a little breathless, joined them.

  Poppy looked at Tim’s arm carefully, but she didn’t touch it. She knew a little bit about injuries from all the football games she’d been to when she was a majorette, and she knew that this wasn’t an open fracture, which was the most dangerous kind of break. Still, his arm was a little swollen, and he was in pain, probably in more pain than he was letting on. Clearly, he needed to go to the emergency room, but after a quick mental calculation, she decided it would be faster for her to drive him there than to wait for an ambulance. Butternut relied on a volunteer ambulance department, and it wasn’t unheard of for people to wait up to half an hour for its members to reach the more remote cabins on the lake. Then, there was still the thirty-minute trip to the hospital.

  “Tim,” she said, making eye contact with him. “You need to get your arm checked out by a doctor, okay?”

  He nodded, a tiny nod, and his freckles stood out dramatically against his chalky skin.

  “I’m going to drive you to the hospital, and Cassie and Hunter are going to come with us, okay?”

  He nodded again.

  “All right, let’s go,” she said, amazed by how calm she was acting when, in fact, she was so nervous that her palms had started to sweat. “Cassie, put your shoes on,” she added, giving the three of them a quick glance and noticing that Cassie was barefoot. “I’ll be right back,” she said, heading inside into the kitchen where she’d seen the emergency numbers and the kid’s health insurance information tacked up on a bulletin board. She took these pieces of paper down. She had Sam’s number in her phone, but she’d need to call Alicia, too, she realized. Then, she checked her handbag. Car keys, wallet, cell phone.

  When she left the cabin, the three children were waiting on the front lawn, Cassie and Hunter looking serious, and Tim still looking ill. As they all got into the car, she called Sam and Alicia. Both calls went to voice mail, but Poppy left a brief message for each of them, relieved that she’d managed to keep the anxiety out of her voice. After the kids were buckled into the backseat—she managed to fasten Tim’s seat belt without touching his arm—she got in and made it as far as the end of the driveway before she realized it was too quiet.

  “Hey,” she said, glancing back at them. “Do you three know ‘99 Bottles of Beer’?”

  “We know it,” Cassie said. “But my mom makes us sing ‘99 Bottles of Coke.’”

  “All right, let’s sing that,” Poppy said, pulling out onto the main road. And they did. They sang it several times before they reached the hospital. And Poppy was careful to drive at the speed limit, and to come to a full stop at stop signs, and to signal before she changed lanes. She’d been to this hospital only once before, when she was eleven and Win had sprained her ankle, but luckily, she found it now without any difficulty.

  She checked the backseat frequently. Cassie and Hunter were belting out the words to the song, and Tim, who sat between them, was singing them more softly. He was resting his head on Hunter’s shoulder, and, on the other side of him, the side with the good arm, he was holding Cassie’s little hand tightly in his own.

  Later, as she sat in the waiting room with Hunter and Cassie, Poppy was relieved to see Win walking through the hospital’s sliding glass doors.

  “You’re here,” she said, as Win came over to them.

  “Of course I’m here,” Win said. “I browbeat Mary Jane into giving me a ride,” she explained. “She’s parking now.”

  “Thank God for Mary Jane,” Poppy said. “Did you bring change?”

  “I brought all the change I could scrounge up,” Win said. She took a plastic bag full of quarters out of her purse and held it out to Hunter.

  “Wow,” he said, taking it from her. “That could buy a lot of stuff at the vending machines.”

  “It could,” Poppy said, with as much sternness as she could muster. “But you and Cassie can only get two items each.”

  “That’s it?” he said, his face falling. “But they have the best stuff here. There are, like, five machines.”

  Poppy wavered. He’d just said three whole sentences to her and she was so pleased that, for a moment, she considered telling him he could buy as many bags of gummy worms or packets of Goldfish or Oreos as Win’s change would allow for. But she caught herself. “That’s it, kiddo,” she said.

  Hunter and Cassie walked off in the direction of th
e vending machines, and Poppy sank, gratefully, into a chair. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “What a time for me not to have any change or small bills.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Win said, sitting down beside her. “How’re you holding up?”

  “Me? I’m fine. I was so worried about Tim, though. Win, you should have seen him after it happened. His face was so white I could have counted every single one of his freckles if I’d wanted to.”

  “But he’s okay now?”

  “He’s okay,” Poppy said. She blew out a long breath. “I mean, the drive here was interminable. It felt like it took at least eight hours. Once we got here, though, everything started to happen really fast. Before I knew it, almost, he’d been admitted, and examined, and x-rayed. And, Win? He was such a trooper. Honestly, I would have cried like a baby if I’d broken my arm at his age. But he was absolutely stoic. And Hunter and Cassie,” she said, shaking her head, “they were so good to him. They really took care of him.”

  “That’s what siblings are for,” Win reminded her. “But I take it his dad’s with him now?”

  “He is. He got here just in time to be with Tim while he’s having his cast put on. It’s going to be electric green,” she added, with amusement. “Because why would anyone want a white cast when they could have an electric green cast?”

  Win smiled. “Did you talk to Sam’s wife?”

  “Her name is Alicia. Yes, she called me back as soon as she got out of court. Fortunately, by then the doctor had told us it was a fractured radius. It helps, I think, if you can put a name to something. It makes it seem less scary.” They were quiet for a moment. “Oh, I should have asked Hunter and Cassie to get something for Tim,” Poppy said, looking in the direction of the vending machines. “He’s going to be hungry by the time he’s done here.”

  “I’m sure they’ll have some quarters left when they get back.” Win smiled. “And Pops? You’re a natural. You’re already thinking like a mom.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Poppy said. “I just did what anyone else would have done.”

  “I don’t know. I think some people might have freaked out.”

  “Honestly, Win, I wanted to freak out,” Poppy admitted. “But I told myself I had to hold it together, for Tim’s sake, anyway, and for Cassie’s and Hunter’s, too. They all kept looking at me like I actually knew what I was doing.”

  “You did know what you were doing.”

  Poppy shook her head. “No. I was faking it.”

  Win laughed. “Poppy, everyone starts out by faking it. It’s the first rule of being an adult. It’s only when you’ve faked it for long enough that you actually start to believe it yourself.”

  CHAPTER 27

  All right, so, you’re probably wondering why I’ve called this meeting,” Sam said that night, looking around the kitchen table at Cassie, Hunter, and Tim. After they’d gotten back from the hospital, Sam had given them their dinner and supervised their showers—Tim with a plastic bag over his cast—and now the three of them were at their cleanest, and, frankly, their most lovable, their wet hair neatly combed, their clean pajamas still smelling faintly of laundry detergent.

  “I know what this is about,” Cassie said, squirming with excitement. “You want to tell us Poppy’s your girlfriend, don’t you?”

  Sam stared at her. How did she know that? “We’ll get to Poppy and me in a minute,” he said. “Right now, I want you all to know how proud I am of you. Tim, you were very brave this afternoon, and Hunter and Cassie, you were, too. I can’t ask any more of the three of you than that you support each other in a crisis, and that you stay strong, together, the way you did today. As a parent, I hope the worst thing that ever happens to any of you is a broken arm, but if that’s not the case, if life has more in store for you than that, then at least I know you’ll always be there for each other.”

  Sam looked around the table. The three of them stared back at him, solemnly. They weren’t used to him being this serious, Sam knew, and he had to smile when Tim raised his hand—his left hand—to ask a question.

  “Tim, that’s not necessary. What is it?”

  “Uh, can I still go in the tree house?”

  “Not with that cast on, you can’t.”

  “But . . . after?”

  Sam sighed. “I think so. I’ll need to talk to your mom about that first. For now, I’d like you to keep both feet on the ground. Do you think that’s possible?”

  Tim nodded.

  “Now can we talk about Poppy?” Cassie asked, squirming again.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “We can.” Having said that, though, he was stumped. Damn it, why hadn’t he bought a book about how to do this? He knew such a book existed. There was a whole cottage industry of books written for divorced parents. The one he needed right now probably had a reassuringly upbeat title like When Dad’s Ready to Date Again, or something like that. But once more, Cassie got ahead of him.

  “Are you and Poppy going to get married?” she asked.

  “Whoa, Cassie. That is not why I called this meeting,” he said. “Poppy and I are going to be friends. We’re going to be . . . special friends. I’m going to be spending time with her. And, because we’re a family, I won’t be the only one spending time with her. You’ll be spending time with her, too. So, I wanted to know what you think of that.” He looked around at the three of them. Cassie was pleased, but the twins, as usual, were more circumspect.

  “Is she going to be eating dinner here with us?” Hunter asked, finally.

  “Sometimes. If she’s not too picky, that is,” he added, with a smile. “We’ll have to explain to her about chicken nuggets being on the menu five nights a week.”

  “No, but, I mean, are we going to have to chew with our mouths closed and everything?” Hunter pressed.

  “Oh, I see,” Sam said. “You’re asking if she’s going to enforce table manners the way your mom does.” This was an area of family life in which Sam had been woefully inadequate.

  “Uh-huh,” Hunter said.

  “Well, let’s assume, for now, that your mom and I will be responsible for that. And, by the way, Hunter, I am going to be stepping up my game here. Using a napkin at mealtime will no longer be optional. Is that understood?”

  Hunter nodded warily.

  “Any more questions?” Sam asked, looking around again.

  “What about Mom?” Tim asked.

  “What about her?” Sam answered, casually, though he felt suddenly tense. He’d heard about children of divorce fantasizing about their parents getting back together again. Was Tim thinking that Sam dating Poppy would rule that out? As it turned out, though, his son was worried about something a little less complicated.

  “You’ll have someone,” Tim said now, “but what about Mom? Won’t she be lonely?”

  Sam shook his head, then reached out and ruffled Tim’s damp hair. He wondered if perhaps his breaking his arm had given him a new sense of empathy. But no, Sam thought. It had always been there. He just didn’t keep it in view for everyone to see. “Your mom won’t be lonely, Tim,” Sam said, “because she has a special friend of her own. I’ll let her tell you about him, but I know he must be a really good guy, because your mom wouldn’t like him if he wasn’t. But you can judge for yourself. I think she’d like you to meet him, sometime soon, so that’ll be fun, right?” But Tim looked unsure about whether this would be fun or not.

  Sam sighed. He and Alicia had discussed this recently, when he’d told her about Poppy. It had been a strange conversation. How odd to share this happiness with someone else, he thought, when that someone else had been the last person to make you this happy. It was all right, though. They would adjust to this new phase of their relationship, just as they had adjusted to all the other phases. After all, they had a huge incentive to work together: their three amazing children.

  “In the meantime, though,” Sam said, “even with our new friends, your mom and I are going to keep talking to each other. And we’re going to
be talking about everything. Bedtime. And homework. And tree houses. You name it. That’s not going to change. All right, anything else?” He looked around. Now it was Cassie’s turn to seem pensive.

  “Dad, you know how Mom reads Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle to me?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will Poppy read it to me, too? Because those books are at Mom’s, and if I bring them here, I might forget to take them back, and then Mom couldn’t read them to me. And, plus, what if we get all mixed about where we are in the book? Mom always keeps a bookmark in it that has a butterfly on it, but what if Poppy doesn’t have a bookmark with a butterfly on it, or even any bookmark at all?”

  Sam looked longingly at one of the kitchen cupboards. There was a really good bottle of red wine in it he’d love to open right about now. But instead he explained to Cassie—patiently, he hoped—that reading Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was something she and her mother would do together. She and Poppy, he hoped, would do other things together.

  “Like twirling?” Cassie suggested, brightly.

  “Like twirling,” Sam agreed, and, sensing a general sleepiness setting in around the table, he announced that it was bedtime. “Tim, your mom wants you to call her before you go to sleep,” he reminded him. And then he hugged and kissed them all good night. Recently, Hunter and Tim had been something less than active participants in these nightly hugs. They didn’t so much hug Sam as allow Sam to hug them. Tonight, though, was different. There was a real hug from Hunter, and a real, though one-armed, hug from Tim.

  Cassie, though, found an excuse to linger at the kitchen table even after the boys had gone. “Dad, did you know that the last time I went to Janelle’s her mom helped us make friendship bracelets and I made one for Poppy?” she asked, climbing into Sam’s lap.

  “I didn’t know that,” Sam said, as she snuggled against him.

  “I’m going to give it to her the next time I see her,” she said, hugging him. “I like her, Daddy. I like her so much.”