Becoming the Talbot Sisters

by Rachel Linden

  Crystal reappeared, and Waverly handed her two more platters. When she was gone, silence fell on the kitchen for a long moment. Charlie took a big bite of cake, the rich browned butter frosting melting on her tongue. She barely noticed the flavor, however, as she thought about the question she’d been wanting to ask since she’d gotten Waverly’s voicemail.

  “At the end,” she asked finally, “did she suffer? Was it peaceful?” She didn’t look up, her eyes fixed on the perfectly sculpted whorls of frosting on her slice of cake. She so wanted Waverly to say yes. Aunt Mae had deserved that, to go out easily. Nothing else in her life had been easy.

  “I don’t know,” Waverly said, her voice strangely flat. “I wasn’t there.” She didn’t look up as she sliced a loaf of chocolate chip banana bread and arranged it on a plate in a fan shape.

  “But I thought . . .” Charlie stopped in surprise. “I got your voicemail that she had passed. I just assumed you were with her.”

  Waverly set the plate down with a clatter and gripped the edge of the table, turning her head away. Her shoulders began to shake. It took Charlie a moment to realize what was happening. Waverly was crying. She stared at her sister in shock. The last time she could remember Waverly crying had been at their parents’ funeral. Charlie watched her uncomfortably for a long moment, unsure how she should respond.

  “Hey,” she said finally. “It’s okay if you weren’t there. You did your best. I’m sure Aunt Mae knew that.”

  Waverly raised her head, sniffing away the tears, cutting off Charlie’s assurance. “I’m not crying about Aunt Mae.” She looked away, facing the porcelain farmhouse sink and the old white refrigerator humming shakily beside it. She took a deep breath. “I wasn’t there because I lost another baby.”

  It took a moment for the words to sink in. Another one. Charlie knew there had been others. “Oh, Waverly,” she murmured, at a loss for words. If they had been closer, had seen each other more, had shared in each other’s lives, would she know what to say? “How far along?” She felt she had to say something, but every phrase seemed the wrong shape.

  “Nine weeks, a week longer than the last one.” Waverly blew out a breath, trying to get herself under control. “I was starting to believe, to hope that it would work this time.” Her hands were balled into fists. “Except it didn’t. And now”—she shut her eyes against the sharp pain of recollection—“my doctor said no more tries. My body can’t handle any more. So that’s it. I can’t have a baby.” She bit her lip, although her chin quivered. Tears made silver tracks down her cheeks. “So I don’t know if it was peaceful or terrible or if Aunt Mae was in pain. I don’t know, because I wasn’t here.”

  Charlie sat in stunned silence. She knew Waverly had been desperate for a baby since her first year or two of marriage, but time and time again her sister’s body had failed to hold on to the life she conceived. Waverly had stopped talking about the miscarriages after the third, and Charlie had not asked. It seemed too invasive to inquire.

  Waverly took a deep breath and blotted carefully below her eyes with a paper napkin from a stack on the table, wiping away the tears without smudging her makeup. She straightened her shoulders and pasted on a smile that gave no hint to the inner grief and turmoil Charlie had glimpsed just seconds before.

  Charlie was aware that people always assumed archetypes about the two of them. They saw Waverly—the soft cloud of pale blond hair, the wide doe-like eyes—and they assigned her the role of the weaker, gentler one who needed to be protected. Inversely, they looked at Charlie, single, direct, and independent, living and working in a region of the world still dominated by men, and they assumed the opposite. But the reality was far more complicated. The truth about Waverly was that under that nimbus of soft hair the color of corn silk, behind those eyes the gentle blue of the new-washed spring sky, lay a shrewd businesswoman, a silken glove with a fist of iron. Since their parents’ death she had weathered every setback and heartbreak dry-eyed, with a determination that was truly formidable. Both Charlie and Waverly were strong-willed, independent, resilient—character traits they had forged amid the loss of their parents and their drastic change in circumstances. Although they differed in many ways, at their core they shared a common strength and grit.

  “There’s nothing left to try,” Waverly continued after regaining her composure. “So that’s it. We’re done. I can’t have a baby.” She looked up at her twin, her gaze open and bleak, as though all hope had been scooped from her world. That look frightened Charlie. She had never seen Waverly so raw, so resigned.

  “What about adoption?” Charlie asked, grasping for any idea that might give her sister hope.

  “Andrew won’t consider it,” Waverly said. “He doesn’t feel the need for a child the way I do. He has Katie.” Andrew had been married before and had a fifteen-year-old daughter who lived most of the year with her mother in Atlanta.

  “There’s nothing else you can do?” Charlie asked, feeling awkward even asking the question.

  Waverly shook her head. “Our only other option would be a surrogate, but the specialists say there’s something wrong with me, with my eggs, and I can’t imagine another woman carrying a baby that’s half of Andrew and none of me. I want to know that a baby is supposed to be ours, that I’m meant to be its mother. I want a connection somehow.” She looked up at Charlie, her eyes swimming with unshed tears. “I’ve longed to be a mother more than anything in the world,” she said finally, “but it seems like it just isn’t meant to be.” She blew out a breath of air, then confessed. “You know the saddest thing? We’re here and I should be mourning Aunt Mae, but I’m mourning my own loss instead.” She looked down at the crumpled napkin clutched in her hand, her expression sad. “Aunt Mae deserves better than that.”

  Charlie opened her mouth to reply, to utter some reassurance, but no words came out.

  At that moment Pastor Shaw stuck his head around the door.

  “Charlotte, Waverly, we’re going to have a few minutes where people can share memories of your aunt. We’re waiting for you to join us.” His soft brown eyes turned down at the corners, and his hair was thinning in the back, making a bald spot the size of a teacup saucer. He gave the sisters a sympathetic look. “You girls all right?”

  Waverly nodded, turning quickly away from him. Charlie caught his eye. “Just give us a second,” she said. He nodded in understanding and withdrew.

  Girls. Charlie smiled ruefully. They were grown women now, successful and strong, but around here they would always be Mae’s girls. When they first showed up at Aunt Mae’s doorstep on the cusp of adolescence, they were grieving and stunned by the monumental changes in their lives, bereft not only of their parents but of their entire world. Gone were the elite private girls’ academy and Joe, their stern-faced driver who picked them up from ballet and classical violin lessons. Gone, too, were the white mansion in Roland Park and the proper Sunday tea with Grandmother Helen, the Boston Brahmin matriarch of their mother’s family.

  The tiny town of Cooksville, Ohio, was their father’s childhood home. After he left for medical school at Johns Hopkins, he chose to stay and build a life and a successful career in Baltimore. Although he never moved back to Cooksville, he retained a fondness for the humble, working-class town of his childhood. For the girls, however, although their paternal roots were sunk deep in its soil, Cooksville had been a place as foreign as Singapore or Bombay.

  In the blink of an eye their privileged, rarified world was replaced by a rural, blue-collar community of people whose lives were markedly different from their own. The first week of deer-hunting season they stared in horror at the carcass of a deer strung up to bleed in their neighbor’s front yard. They strained to understand the rural southern Ohio accent, where people instructed them to “warsh up for supper” and where tin and ten and pin and pen sounded exactly the same.

  Each week they navigated the aisles of Walmart, helping Aunt Mae compare prices and check the sales fliers. They learned the va
lue of thrift—cleaning their dinner plates and counting their pennies. What Waverly missed, she confided to Charlie, was the gleaming granite and stainless steel kitchen of their childhood home and her set of monogrammed baking dishes from a gourmet cooking store in New York City. She longed for Mademoiselle Amelie’s ballet studio where she’d been taking lessons for many years.

  Charlie didn’t mind the financial constraints of their new life, but she struggled with the feeling of geographical limitation. Most residents of Cooksville were born and died within the town limits, their view of the world shaped largely by their small community. Charlie felt hemmed in by the small-town life, aware of a wider world but removed from it. The knowledge made her itchy to break free from Cooksville, to see something bigger. At the first opportunity she had done just that, kicking the Appalachian dust from her heels and setting out for more exotic destinations.

  The girls had been welcomed by the community with a practical, unspoken kindness, but even so, they had never really felt at home there. In some fundamental way their sense of home had died with their parents. Once grown, they had built lives for themselves far away from this poor little pocket of the world. Now returning out of necessity, they found themselves embraced once again, welcomed back with the same warmth and kindness, as though they had never left.

  “You ready to go?” Charlie asked gently.

  Waverly took a deep breath, smoothing her dress, composing herself. “Yes, of course.”

  They went in together.

  CHAPTER 3

  Charlie awoke at two in the morning, coming out of the black well of sleep with a suddenness that disoriented her. For a moment she could not place herself. She looked around the room, at the dim outline of the white wardrobe and matching dresser, the little square-paned window where the silver glimmer of moon made an outline on the wood floor. Aunt Mae’s house. The words floated through her mind, surprising her. For the space of several seconds, she was thrown backward in time, a teenager again in the small gabled room. Was it time to get up for school?

  With the thought came a memory so vivid she could taste it—waiting for the lumbering yellow school bus in a light drizzle of rain, the chilly autumn air heavy with the smell of wet brown leaves and woodsmoke. Waverly standing beside her in a mustard-yellow pleated cheerleading skirt, a brown bag lunch in her hand, calling out, “Here’s the bus, Charlie. Finally! I can’t feel my toes anymore.”

  Charlie glanced over at the other twin bed, but the white chenille bedspread was smooth and tucked taut across the empty pillow. In an instant she was back in the present. Aunt Mae’s death. The funeral the day before. Waverly looking up at her with a desolate expression Charlie had never seen before. “There’s nothing left to try,” she’d said, tears glistening on her cheeks. “So that’s it. We’re done. I can’t have a baby.”

  Charlie sighed. It had been a brutal day.

  Wide-awake, jet-lagged, and thirsty, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and grabbed the book she’d been reading before she fell asleep, a dog-eared copy of The Grapes of Wrath left over from her high school AP English course. She made her way barefoot down the creaking stairs to the kitchen and flipped on the humming overhead light. She set the book on the table. She always carried a book with her, just in case she got bored or had a travel delay, which happened frequently in her line of work.

  She was alone in the house. Waverly and Andrew were ensconced in the Hide-a-Way Inn in town, the only establishment of its kind in tiny Cooksville. It leaned heavily toward animal-head trophies and tartan, a combination that was intended to conjure up a Scottish Highlands vibe but instead managed to look both shabby and tacky at the same time.

  Charlie ran a glass of cold well water from the tap, the pipes under the sink groaning in protest as she turned off the faucet. She sat down at the table, now stacked with a tidy set of empty washed Tupperware containers labeled by owner, waiting to be picked up. She took a long swallow of water, savoring the familiar taste of the minerals.

  For a moment she was lulled by the surroundings into a sense of contentment, but it was followed closely by a sharp pang of grief when she remembered who was missing. Aunt Mae didn’t feel dead, just absent, as though she’d run down to the basement to fetch some canned beets but would return any minute. Charlie half expected to see her stumping up the creaking stairs, Mason jar in hand.

  Charlie drained the water in one long gulp and got up to refill her tumbler. On the counter by the sink sat a stack of unopened mail and two scratch-off lotto tickets, unscratched. Mae’s next-door neighbor Ed Waters must have brought them to her before she died. Charlie picked up the tickets.

  Her aunt had possessed a firm and deep-seated belief that one day the Good Lord would pay her back for all her earthly trials by letting her win the lottery.

  “I don’t need to win much,” she’d claimed, “but one day I’m going to win me enough to go to Hawaii. I’m going to sit on one of those black sand beaches and drink piña coladas out of a coconut and watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.” She set aside five dollars a week for the tickets she favored—games like 10X the Money or Emerald Riches. She never made it to Hawaii. Waverly had been planning to take her to their time share in Kauai for her seventy-fifth birthday as a surprise, but after the cancer diagnosis Aunt Mae had declined more rapidly than anyone had expected and there had been no time. Charlie frowned, saddened by the memory.

  Aunt Mae kept a bottle of bottom-shelf bourbon in the cupboard behind the flour container and took two fingers of it on ice every Friday evening when she scratched off the tickets, waiting to see if her luck would change. On a whim Charlie opened the cupboard and rooted around, finding the mostly empty bottle of Rebel Yell. She poured herself two fingers of the stuff, dropped in an ice cube, and took it back to the table with the lotto tickets. She took a sip, grimacing at the raw taste, and then scratched off the lotto tickets. First Cash Blast and then Gold Fish. No winners.

  “Well, maybe you’ve already won the jackpot,” Charlie murmured. Despite ten years of Sunday school at All Saints Episcopal Church in Baltimore as a child, Charlie remained mostly agnostic about the concept of heaven. But if there was one, she was sure Aunt Mae was enjoying herself somewhere in the Great Beyond. Mae had not been a saint by any textbook definition, but she had been pious in her own earthy, salty way. She’d believed that generosity was the marrow of humanity and that the greatest goals in life were to sacrifice for others and to be faithful and uncomplaining no matter what the Good Lord saw fit to give you. Her favorite story in the Bible was about the widow who gave two small copper coins at the temple. Rich people in front of the widow gave large sums out of their abundance, but she gave all she had to live on. Aunt Mae had taken that story to heart.

  “Whatever the Good Lord puts in your hand you give back to others,” she’d told the twins more times than they could count. It was the Gospel According to Aunt Mae.

  Her words had been good precepts to live by, ones that had benefited Charlie and Waverly far more than they realized in their teen years. Only now in adulthood could Charlie see the value in them, see what she and Waverly had gained by those simple virtues. She could only guess what it must have cost Aunt Mae to stick to them so faithfully.

  Charlie raised her glass in a silent salute and took a sip, closing her eyes against the burn of the liquor. She was struck with a sudden regret. Why had she not come sooner, when Aunt Mae had still been living, standing in the kitchen in her blue terry cloth house slippers, watching the television and imagining herself on that black sand beach with a tropical drink in her hand? Why had she come only now, when it was too late, when she was alone in this house with only the memory and shadow of Mae?

  “I’m sorry,” she said aloud, penitent. “I should have come sooner.” She didn’t know if Aunt Mae could hear her, but she had to say it all the same.

  “I just . . . Work was busy,” she said, aware that those words rang hollow, both true and now irrelevant. Work was always
busy. That was no excuse. She had no excuse.

  She knew Aunt Mae had not expected her to come, and somehow that made it worse. A woman who had sacrificed as much as she had, raising two orphaned girls through their tumultuous teen years, working a tedious shift job at the local mattress factory just to keep them in cereal and tampons and winter coats. And she would not have expected them to come. Charlie tightened her hand around the tumbler, struck by a sharp sorrow. It was too late. She could not make this right.

  Somehow time had flown by and she had not even realized it. In seventeen years she’d returned only a handful of times. When she left South Africa for good six years ago, shattered and disillusioned and desperate for a change, she had not returned to Ohio. She had gone instead to Budapest, and the years in Central Europe had sped by without her even really counting them. How long had it been since she’d touched American soil? Two years? Three? She couldn’t quite remember.

  Restless with guilt and suddenly ravenous, Charlie jumped up and rummaged through the refrigerator. It was stocked with leftovers from the funeral, but she passed them by, looking for something simple and familiar. A few slices of American cheese sitting in their cellophane sleeves caught her eye. Beside them sat a loaf of sliced white bread.

  With a sudden dart of nostalgia, Charlie pictured sitting at the kitchen table with Waverly on school nights, eating grilled cheese sandwiches on discount white bread, dipping the edges in creamy bowls of canned tomato soup, watching Wheel of Fortune with Aunt Mae as she stood at the stove pressing a plastic spatula into the tops of the sandwiches to make the cheese melt faster.

  “Try an H,” Aunt Mae would advise the contestants and then shake her head when they chose an R or L. “Of course she didn’t get it,” she’d mutter as she turned the sandwiches. “Should have bought a vowel.”