by Sarah Price
Frances frowned and reread the letter. Why hadn’t Madeline told her the truth? Setting the letter onto her lap, Frances stared at the wall. She hadn’t realized how much she had in common with Madeline. Even if it hadn’t been Frances’s original intention, she, too, had isolated herself from her family. Had she not fainted on Thanksgiving, how long would she have kept her secret? How would they have reacted later? Perhaps she, too, would have lost the very thing she cherished more than anything: her family.
And yet, while Madeline had hinted to Frances that the children had abandoned her, it was clear from this letter that Gladys had tried to stay in touch with her mother. The letter confirmed what James had told her at the funeral. So while Madeline told others that her children did not care about her, the truth was that Madeline had ignored her children’s attempts to be a part of her life.
Frances continued rifling through the envelopes and saw one from James and two from her other daughter, Marion. And then her eyes fell upon the last envelope. It was yellowed with age, the postmark from December 1980. Almost forty years old. There was no return address.
She flipped the letter over and opened it, carefully extracting the contents. Inside was a two-page letter in the neatest handwriting that Frances had ever seen. It was as if great pains had been taken to ensure that the letter was meticulous in delivering its message.
Dear Sister,
The holiday season is almost upon us. I fear that this will be my last Christmas. Surely I will soon pass from this earthly life to my heavenly home.
When a person has a terminal disease, there are few things that bring them greater joy than surrounding themselves with the people they love. I have missed seeing my nieces and nephew. And I have missed seeing my only sister.
I don’t begin to understand your reasons for avoiding me. However, I suspect it’s better than having pity from you. I do have one last request that I hope you will honor.
When I breathe my last breath and ascend to be with God and Jesus, please take comfort in the fact that I have forgiven you. Later in life, if your decision to shun me during my final days returns to haunt you, it will be important for you to know that forgiveness was given long before you asked for it.
I wish things could have been different, Madeline. But I will die knowing that I have told you what is in my heart. Since I cannot have you beside me when I live my final days, I will relive the happier days from our youth and surround myself with people who neither pity me nor fear my illness. I shall continue to surround myself with true friends, people who care deeply for us—in both the best of times and the worst of times. I only wish you were included in that increasingly small circle.
It is the next best thing to having you, my dear sister and sweet friend of my childhood, beside me.
With all my sisterly love,
Barbara
Frances placed the letter upon her lap and stared out the window, her eyes falling upon the bird feeder. She felt as if she should cry, but the tears would not come.
She was beginning to understand what had happened, how Madeline had abandoned her sister during her illness and kept her children away from her dying sister. She couldn’t begin to understand why, but she did understand that Madeline’s decision had created a backlash among her family.
And yet they had all tried to reach out to her during her final years.
Madeline, however, had rebuffed them and let herself live in much the same manner as her sister had lived: alone. Only, Barbara had wanted to have her family around her, while Madeline had not. It was almost as if Madeline had punished herself for her own decision, almost forty years ago, to disavow her sister.
What Frances couldn’t understand, however, was why.
She started to fold up the letter and put it back in the envelope when she noticed that there was something else in it. A photo.
Carefully, Frances withdrew the small photo with rounded edges. She flipped it over and looked at the image of two people: an older women and a child. The woman sat in a red sleigh with a child standing next to her. There was snow on the ground, and both of them smiled as if it was the happiest of times.
A chill ran throughout her body and goose bumps covered her arms as she realized that she was staring at the photograph of herself as a child standing beside Mrs. Bentley. In disbelief, she flipped the photo over again and noticed the same elegant handwriting on the back: Merry Christmas, Madeline. Your loving sister, Barbara Bentley.
Frances just stared at the elegant handwriting. The words shocked her more than the actual photo. How unbelievable was the hand of God to have made this come full circle! Memories came flooding back to her, memories of her mother bemoaning the amount of effort she had put into tending to Mrs. Bentley, a woman who now, almost forty years later, had a first name. Her mother complaining about having to help that poor, pathetic woman with no family to assist her when, all along, Mrs. Bentley had family who didn’t even know that she was ill.
Her emotions began to pull her into a new dimension of understanding how the effects of disease affected other people. Madeline had run in fear of the very disease that ultimately took her life. Yet, in doing so, she had alienated the very people who she would one day need to call upon for support. She had supported that detachment through her own actions when she estranged herself from her sister and chose not to accept the support of her family. Instead, she had chosen to push them away, refusing to accept the very thing that she had denied Barbara.
Frances sat on the edge of Madeline’s bed, tears filling her eyes. For the first time since her diagnosis, she understood. She understood her own cancer and her reaction to it. She understood her inability to forcibly tell her husband as well as her reluctance to inform her family.
Tears streamed down her face, and she did nothing to wipe them away. Instead, she set the letters down on the bed and stood up. Slowly, she walked toward the window and paused before she opened it. She reached outside to pluck the bird feeder from the other window, tugging gently so that the suction cups that held it released without spilling too much of the birdseed.
She cradled it in her arms and turned to walk toward the door. Then she stopped and glanced at the packet of letters that she had laid upon the bed. She left them for James to find in the hope that he, too, might better understand the pain and suffering that his mother had gone through when she had decided to live the end of her life in the same manner which she’d forced Barbara to end hers: alone.
Only, God had made a final decision for both Barbara and Madeline that they would not end their lives alone. Somehow God had set Frances in their lives to ensure that their final days would be in the company of one person who did not judge and would love them, whether the love came in the form of a small child willing to take a Christmas photo with a dying neighbor or a sick woman choosing to provide friendship to a dying stranger.
With the bird feeder tucked under one arm, she reached over to flick off the overhead light in the room, and then she shut the door behind her as she said her final good-bye to the one friend who had taught her to live during her fight against cancer.
EPILOGUE
Frances stood at the kitchen sink, washing the dinner dishes. The sun was just beginning to set behind the trees in the backyard, the golden rays shining through the glass and shimmering on the water in the sink. She didn’t mind the glare that blinded her eyes when she lifted the dishes from the soapy water to rinse them under the faucet. It was just one more reminder that spring was finally there.
“Mom! Come look!” Carrie called out from the family room.
“Just a minute,” she called as she finished the last dish, setting it on the drying rack. She much preferred washing the dishes by hand than putting them into the dishwasher. For some reason, it felt as if it was the completion of a routine, rather than the avoidance of a thankless task.
Drying her hands on a dish towel, she walked into the other room. “What is it, sweetheart?”
Carrie pointed t
oward the window. “Look! A nuthatch!”
Frances raised her hand to her head and peered out the window. Sure enough, at Madeline’s bird feeder, a small nuthatch was plucking birdseed from the tiny holes. “Oh my! Look at how pretty he is!”
“Maybe it’s a she,” Carrie said.
“The males have the dark eye stripe, remember?”
Carrie thought for a moment and then nodded. “That’s right.”
Frances smiled. “But he sure is beautiful, isn’t he?”
Nicholas walked into the room, a mug of coffee in his hands. “What’s going on, girls?”
Frances didn’t answer but pointed out the window.
“Ah. We have a visitor, do we?”
All winter, they had been watching the different birds that came to feed at the bird feeder that was affixed to the window. It had become a family event to identify new birds and look them up on the Internet. By now, they had counted over twenty different species and could identify them by name, although not always by gender.
Frances raised her hand to touch her newly sprouted crop of hair.
“His hair is almost as long as mine,” she quipped.
Nicholas smiled at her. “But he’s not as beautiful, is he, Carrie?”
Carrie made a gagging noise, which both of her parents teasingly scowled at.
“Finish up your homework now,” Frances said gently to her daughter. “Andy will be home soon from baseball practice, and he’ll want to watch a movie.”
“With all of us?”
Nicholas gave her a stern look. “If you finish your homework by the time he finishes his supper. And take the puppy outside.”
This time Carrie groaned. “It’s so cold out!”
“Hey! A deal’s a deal,” Nicholas said.
“Aw, Dad!”
He gave an exaggerated sigh. “Fine. But just this once,” he said. As he walked toward the back door, he whistled.
The three-month-old yellow Labrador emerged from behind the reclining chair in the television room. He stretched and yawned before looking up at Nicholas with bright eyes, his tail wagging happily.
“Let’s go, Harley,” he said as he opened the door for the puppy to trot down the steps onto the shoveled walk and toward the snow-covered grass. The other dogs bounded after them, leaping through the melting snow behind the puppy.
Both Carrie and Frances watched Nicholas with the dog. A late Christmas present, the little foster puppy from the Seeing Eye had been Nicholas’s surprise for everyone in the family. And while the children were supposed to take care of him, it seemed that Nicholas was commandeering that role, by choice more often than necessity.
Turning away from the open glass door, Frances put her hand on Carrie’s shoulder. “Finish that up,” she reminded her daughter.
“OK, OK.”
When Carrie tilted her head back over her textbook, Frances walked over to the window, looking at the nuthatch, which seemed undisturbed by her presence. She watched him until, at last, he had his fill of seed and flew off to hunker down for the night. Only then did she turn to look at the photo on her bookshelf, the one of her and Mrs. Barbara Bentley. She glanced at it almost every evening before she retired, considering it a constant reminder of how much a faded photo could change her past, present, and future.
Regardless of what the future held for her, she remained grateful for the reminder of how much her past had altered her present. And she remained grateful for the gift of Madeline, for having brought her family together at last. A gift from a woman who gave so much without knowing that she gave anything at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A former college professor, bestselling author Sarah Price began writing full-time after she was diagnosed with cancer in 2013. She has written more than twenty novels, but The Faded Photo is her first foray into women’s fiction. Drawing on her own experiences as a survivor of both breast cancer and domestic violence, Sarah explores the issues that touch—and shape—women’s lives. Sarah lives in Morristown, New Jersey, with her husband and two children.